How do we create a digital concept from textures?

Discover how modern animation revolutionizes visual storytelling and the art behind creating realistic textures in digital painting. Join us!

We are used to realistic 3D rendering from the big franchises, so we often forget that there are many other unexplored artistic ways to represent something. TV series like Love, Death & Robots from Netflix have brought back hope to many artists. We are still capable of creating new visual styles that impact the global audience.

Where to start?

We make the same mistake to avoid creating new visual styles that no one has seen before. Here is where our brain starts to fall into the same pattern. We become overwhelmed, repeat the same things that already exist, and lose motivation to create something new.

I won’t lie; we have all fallen into this pattern before.

The reason why this happens is because we forget that to start something new, you need to understand how our world works and the materials within. For example, why does wood have grains? Why does wood have many colors? When should the wood shine?

We may know this information because we read it somewhere else, we could even have an illustration as reference; thinking by saving the illustration we would be able to replicate it. It has happened to me before, but when doing it by memory, things change. We try to replicate the texture from memory but while doing it we realize we don’t understand why it’s behaving that way and/or how to represent it.

The first steps

To answer your question confidently, I can tell you that the first step is understanding how the material works. Within this course “Digital Painting: Improve your textures”, we will take the time to study wood, plastic, glass, and water. With observation and practice, we will understand the properties of a material and which is the right path to represent an illustration. By dominating these concepts, we can exaggerate or simplify material characteristics surrounding us and confidently decide to create a unique visual image.

Exploring Wood

In the following example, we bring you a ramen spoon I created to continue studying and improve my knowledge of textures. Personally, wood is a material that I really love. On this occasion, I wanted to explore a different version by adding some lines on the shadow and a few visual graphics surrounding it. In this article, I’ll share the PSD where I performed my exercises so you can see the type of applied studies on an element that already exists, like, in this case, a spoon.

I hope the content is useful to you all and thanks for reading.
Continue exploring and creating!