February: the month of love, winter storms, and another blog post about handmade textures.
Can you believe it’s already February? A lot is happening this month: I just got married (whoop!), the other half and I are applying for visa status from the UK for moi, we’re getting our cats, Baby and Chica, ready for a transatlantic voyage, and I have a few books in the works. I never thought I would try to pack so much into 28 days.
That being said, this blog has become a sort of a haven for me. A place to slow down and focus on one thing for a little while. I’m so happy to take a breath and just think about this month’s theme: a texture companion blog post to last month’s post, where I went over how to create your own handmade textures.
Creating your own handmade textures is all good and dandy, but what do you do with those textures once you have them??
The idea behind creating my last two blog posts actually originated because I wanted to create supplemental resources for my almost-released Domestika course, Creating a Children’s Illustration Portfolio.
Domestika is an online learning platform that specializes in creative courses about pretty much anything. While making my class about creating a children’s book portfolio, I found out that there is A LOT that goes into making a children’s illustration class curriculum! With the help of my fairy godmother of a producer, Gina, I filled in pages and pages of curriculum detailing exactly what we were going to talk about in each lesson. In the end, we had to cut a LOT of content because we couldn’t fit everything into a 3-hour course.
If you’ve ever taken a Domestika class (which you totally should; I may be biased but I LOVE them) they’re only a few hours long at most. My producer encouraged me to not throw away all that extra content from the curriculum, but instead create “supplemental resources” that students could view outside the class, such as pdf tutorials and videos.
SO…this blog post IS one of the supplement resources!
Handmade textures give my illustrations a tangible and warm quality that draws in a lot of my clients and gets me enough work to be a full-time children’s book illustrator. Along with making this blog as a supplement to my Domestika course, I’m creating these art process posts to help you understand how you can incorporate your handmade, unique textures into your illustrations.
3 Ways I Incorporate Texture into my Digital Illustration
Using texture as a collage. I was talking to a friend and critique partner recently, and I showed him how I use a certain watercolor brush in Procreate. I made a color layer and then cut out the shape I wanted with a lasso tool. He was surprised when he saw that I don’t use the watercolor brush in Procreate like I would using traditional watercolor paints. Yeehaw! At that point I realized I tend to use color and texture like collage - I lay it down and then cut it out digitally. It’s SO NICE using texture like this because it's an easy and fast way to get base colors down for painting. In this case, it worked out perfectly because the texture I used had a mottled look, much like an elephant hide. And let’s be honest; I don’t know if I could have achieved that look with just Procreate brushes!
Using texture as an overlay. While I was making the textures, I kept in mind that I would use them as overlay layers, specifically the rough pastel textures that I created, on different parts of the elephant and its surroundings. I knew that I wanted to use those rough, shadowy textures around the elephant's ears, hands and feet. In real life, animals, and people aren’t all one color! If you look at a picture of an elephant, you’ll notice that its feet and ears are a different tone from its face and stomach, and the end of its trunk is a different tone from the beginning of the trunk. Adding in those little textures, like the darker pastels, changes the tone and creates a gradient around the extremities that adds form to your character and illustration. Try using this method in one of your illustrations and let me know how it works for you. :)
Using texture as accents. This is a lot like #2 because you’ll most likely be overlaying these accents as well, EXCEPT these accents aren’t super obvious. They are the teeny tiny bits that make your piece perfect. These last little accents (like the brush textures I used to create the blushed cheeks of the elephant) are the last sprinkle on top of the cherry on top of your illustration cake. If it feels like your piece isn’t quite there, try adding an accent texture (something small!) to see if that’s just what you needed to make it perfect. I also love adding a couple of ink splatters right when I’m finishing up an illustration; the little accent makes ALL the difference at the end and I’m often too scared to try adding those in my traditionally painted pieces. I usually end up getting paint everywhere!
While I could just write about it, I thought it would be beneficial to actually show you how I incorporate texture into my illustrations using Procreate. Sooooo *tiny drum roll* here’s a time-lapse of me using my handmade textures to make a digital illustration!
I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty technical aspects of how I illustrate in Procreate but let me know if you’d like to learn about that and I’ll share in a separate blog post!
*Quick Tip! When I don’t need super high resolution versions of my textures, I’ll just take a picture of them in nice quality light with my iPad and import those photos into Procreate.
That’s about it! However you end up using your handmade textures, remember, enjoy the process!
You do you: try different ways of incorporating that warm, fuzzy, handmade feeling into your illustrations and share your illustrations with me through email or instagram: @marissaarts. I’d love to see what you make!
Goodbye for now, mark-makers! See you next month ❤️
One of my fav wedding photos! Photography by @picnikkphotos