Textures, Textures, and more TEXTURES

My newest addiction: TEXTURES! I love me some textures on my portraits. It just adds a little something to them that I like. The only thing is, you either LOVE them or you HATE them. And it is easy to get carried away.



Obviously, I L-O-V-E them (and lately I have been getting a little carried away) but what I love even more is Shadowhouse Creations. They have AWESOME sets of textures that are free to download and even include commercial usage rights (which is VERY cool of them).

Look at what it does to the picture below:


You can see all the grundge especially on the walls.

If you don't know how to use textures it's actually REALLY easy. First, make all of the creative color changes that you want to make to your picture.

In my example above, before I laid my texture down I ran the photoshop action "Grandma's Tap Shoes" by Totally RAD Actions.

Next open up your texture, I used one of the textures by Shadowhouse Creations,
and lay it over your portrait.

Lastly change your blending mode (I used Soft Light) in your layers palette and create a layer mask. The layer mask allows you to take a brush (be sure to change your forground color to black) to paint over the areas that you don't want the texture over (like skin tones: which I didn't do on the first above image- excitement got the best of me- but went back and did for final output).

That's it. Easy as 1-2-3.

I just recently downloaded these and so you can be sure to see much more TEXTURE love coming out your way! But if you want to see some more examples check out my album on my facebook FAN page.