tutorial: hey amika how did you get that texture

ok a bunch of people have asked me about my colours ive been posting lately and i think trade secrets are dumb and not hiding tricks up your sleeve keeps you on your toes. but yeah my textures are super easy, i consider it post processing.

- i’m using photoshop CC 2014 but im pretty sure you can do this with your version of photoshop. i’ve also had some people yell at me on twitter when i insinuate the GIMP isn’t a comparable program (unfortunately!) and insist that you can do anything in the GIMP that you can in photoshop, so, there you go.

- i’m doing this on a 300dpi image & you might want to mess around with some of these numbers if you’re working smaller than that.

Step 1: i colour my image. most of my shading happens in ink or not at all so my colouring is basically just flats & sometimes coloured lines. i only do shadow when i feel like i need to.

Step 2: i make a new layer on top of everything and fill it with any colour. then filter > noise > add noise, set it to 100%. i do uniform colour noise because i like the shimmery chromatic undertones but do w/e suits your purposes.

Then I set the noise layer to overlay or soft light at 20-50% but again just mess around til it suits your need.

Step 3: select the whole image, copy the whole thing however you do to a new document (i just use whatever hotkeys it says under edit>copy merged on your computer, its diff for mac and pc).

in the new document, i will usually image>adjustments>black & white and just tweak the sliders until the emphasis is where i want it to be. you can skip this if you don’t care.

then i image>mode>Grayscale, flatten/throw out whatever colour info, then image>mode>Bitmap which will now be activated. The output should match your main document dpi, the method should be “Halftone Screen…” with the ominous ellipse.

Once you hit ok it’ll open another window. I use a frequency of 25 lpi at a 45 degree angle (the angle black plates are set to in offset printing, it creates halftone dots at a 45 degree angle which pleases me). i like a round shape. If you lower the lpi you’ll get bigger dots.

Then I copy it back to the original document and set it to overlay or soft light and adjust the opacity as necessary.

For the subtle chromatic aberration effect, I copy the page into a new CYMK document, go to the channels tab in the layers with the move tool and just nudge the cyan and magenta channels slightly out of place with my arrow keys. you might want to image>canvas size and add a little onto the edges since nudging the channels will mess up the edges, then just crop it back off.

it’s subtle, but you can see it especially in high contrast areas like the eyes and cigarette. sometimes i make a few layers with different degrees of channel nudging to add dimension:

(check out the balloons vs the fireworks)

* oh yeah, halftones tend to mess up on computer screens if you scale them down, so make sure if you do scale down the DPI you do it by halves, eg 300dpi can be scaled down to 150 or 75 – i recommend 75 for showing on a computer screen. i also recommend resampling via bicubic (smooth gradients) rather than what photoshop does automatically/bicubic sharper.

secret step 4: experiment until it looks different enough from mine that nobody will ever know.

congratulations!!! you did it!!! good job!!! enjoy being disillusioned upon realizing im not actually as good at colouring as i act.

im bad at tutorials so hmu on here or twitter if you have questions

edit: im dumb i added another screencap to show the aberration effect at size