How To Apply Texture To Your Whole Artwork (Patreon)

Hello my lovely flowers!

You know how much I love texture in my illustrations and usually I use texture brushes for that, but sometimes I like to add texture to my whole illustration and it can be done really easily so I wanted to show you how!

All you need is some digital art and a photo or pattern of a texture. I’ve made a set of my own textures and perhaps I’ll make a separate tutorial for that so I can show you how to take quality photos of textures, but you can also buy textures online througha site like Creative Market or Etsy.

I’ve also attached the texture I’ll be using in this tutorial below so feel free to use that for your own art!

So, adding this texture to your art is really simple, and you can either add it to your whole illustration or sometimes I just add it over a plain background to jazz it up.

Basically, you put your texture on top of everything and make it ‘overlay’ blend mode and reduce the opacity of it, and that’s pretty much it! It can be quite a subtle effect but makes a big difference to the overall feel of your art (if you like texture!).

Here's a more detailed look at the process using Procreate as an example, but you can do the same process in any digital art software.

How To Add A Texture Overlay

Open your digital art in the software you’re using, and go to the top layer.

Import your texture image so that it’s a new layer above everything else, and resize it so that it covers everything you want texture on.

Now set the texture image layer to ‘overlay’ blend mode (or you can use soft light or have fun playing around with different blend modes).

Now the texture is overlaid on top of your artwork, but it’ll probably look way too strong, so reduce the opacity of your texture layer to around 10-30% (or whatever you like the look of).

And that's it!

I also go through this process in my brush pack video if you find that easier to follow but wanted there to be a text version here that was easy to find.

So you're very welcome to download my texture below and use it for your own artwork - enjoy! 🥰✨