Here we are at my "Hand-Drawn" tutorial. Time to include some disclaimers, as my articles seem to do. First, when I say "Hand-Drawn" (which I won't be quoting or capitalizing from this point forth), I don't mean "every pixel placed by hand, with the mouse". Hand-drawn simply means (for me) "no photo-base used". Now, in this particular texture (albeit not until the next article) does in fact deal quite a bit with "true" hand-drawn work. I'll be using my tablet to add a lot of detail. But this half of the article is almost exclusively filters. So...don't hate me for calling it hand-drawn. :)

Anyway, on with the texture.

Make a 512x512 image. Make a new layer. Fill that layer with brown.

Add a light bit of noise. I do this with almost _all_ of my hand-drawn textures. It helps (especially when size is reduced) to give a more convincing, random, "real-world" feel to them.

Using Eye Candy's "HSB noise" feature, I added in some "wood grain" (not very realistic just yet).

Now I'm reducing size using my patented "drop halfway....

...sharpen and drop the rest of the way" technique. MAKE SURE you flatten your layers before resizing like this (I didn't, and thus had to go through a bunch of trouble to get rid of a seam that appeared). This leaves us with....

A 256x256 wood grain. I added some light shadows and hilights with the dodge/burn tool. Still not terrifically realistic looking, but that's not a problem. See, we're going to be doing a lot of work with the dodge/burn tool next week.

This will make a mediocre wood grain look a lot better. For now though, I've decided I want the image to be 128 pixels high, and 256 pixels wide. Right now it's not. Let's fix this problem.

Stretching the image to 256x128 will again compress the HSB noise affect, now with shadows and hilights, which will in turn help the realism of the wood grain.

Now we have our image (at 200x zoom). I offset it 64 pixels down and 128 to the right, and a troublesome seam has shown up. Time to get rid of it. Here I'm copying a piece of the wood...

... and placing it over the seam. Now we've created two seems. Kinda seems like we're moving backwards, eh? Trust me for a minute. This is a technique I use when the clone tool would be annoying. :)

I'm rotating the pasted piece by 180 degrees, so it's not as obvious that its been cut from another area of the texture.

The flipping also (by lucky coincidence) helped the texture to blend in a bit better. Now all we have to do is...

Use the erasing tool to gradually let areas of the sub-texture show through, creating seamless blends. Neat, huh?

Now merge the pasted layer with the regular layer, and we have our base wood. Again, still not as realistic as a photo-base texture (creating something that was would be very time consuming), but not bad. We're going to be adding patterns and whatnot next week, which will make this texture look even better (trust me).

Here's the texture at its normal 256x128 size, just for reference.