A few days ago I was out browsing on my Deviantart account and I ran across this link from Sirius-sdz and his collection of textures. As a digital painter and producer of fine art works, I generally build my own backgrounds, but I’m always looking for great inspiration or materials I could use to assist in the transformation of files into those compositing backgrounds.
So when I ran across this link and found out that you could purchase his entire collection for a VERY FAIR price (you should go check out his material!) I couldn’t resist downloading his collection. Now the very last thing I really need is another texture. Because I also shoot my own and I’m sure in my travels abroad, people have commented about that strange American tourist taking pictures of “that wall!”… but I digress!
So I did purchase the collection… doing my part to stimulate the economy and all… and I have sorted the collection into my Lightroom folders to align with my other several thousand textures.. And today, I wanted to take a couple of the textures from this collection and show you what you could do with these to make your painterly backgrounds for fine art paintings.
I started with just ONE image from one of the premium packs, image 24 from premium pack 33. Here it is.
I took this one image through topaz impressions several times and each time I built a preset to make a different painterly effect that looked similar to a painted canvas using these colors. Here are the 5 different backgrounds I designed from topaz using just this one image.
By adding a little blur, a little desaturation, changing the hue a bit, I could use any one of these as a painted background for a portrait or composite. But they don’t really have much depth or texture, so I didn’t stop here.
I then looked through the folders of “walls” from the purchased collections and picked these four different files.
I then begin to stack copies of these walls along with different versions of the painted backgrounds and play with different blend modes at different levels of opacity. I have no idea what the final recipes were for these final images, as I just kept reorganizing the layers and changing blend modes and when I got something I liked, I exported the jpeg file. That’s the fun of exploring with textures, sometimes you combine things and stumble on some really cool results. Even changing the order of the layers will give you absolutely different looks.
With a few combinations, most of these finals had at least 2 colored layers and 2 textures (some had 3 textures), these are the four final painterly backgrounds I designed for my image compositions. I can now change these up yet again by just putting a gradient map over the top or a hue saturation adjustment layer on top and get a dozen or more unique designs without building any additional files.
Here are the final four. The entire process took less than an hour to create.
Hope you found this article helpful! Let’s go paint!
BONUS for the regular readers and painters out there!
I know that most folks don’t have the topaz impressions, the first step in this process. So I also looked at a variety of different brush tips and built some brushes that will simulate the painterly backgrounds that come out of topaz. Here is one example that I brushes out in like 25 seconds! You just set 2 different colors on your foreground and background palette in Photoshop and then change them up a bit to get some more colors. The brushes have hue, saturation and brightness jitter built in and they automatically mix the foreground and background colors as you paint.
CREDIT: The original brush tips for three of the brushes used here were downloaded from Deviantart from Marcianek’s account and one was from a pack by DanLuVisiArt.. thanks folks for sharing your talents!!
I then modified them like crazy to make these brushes. I basically used their tips and made my own brushes…
I added a zip file of a couple of my painters and a couple mixers for you to try. The download button is below. You can then make a painterly layer and used some textures to practice building different combinations of layers in Photoshop to make your final studio or painterly backgrounds.
#textures, #backgrounds, #blendmodes
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