017 - IFX tutorial - Painting wood
This tutorial was written for ImagineFX magazine Issue#5.
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Painting wood.
You can create wooden patterns playing with filters and brushes in Photoshop, but painting it from scratch will add your own personal style to it. It’s actually quite simple to give something a wooden appearance, and not as tricky as some might think. You simply have to be bold enough with your brush strokes.I tend to stop before fiddling around for too long, as it’s too easy to get carried away over-detailing wooden patterns. Go easy on the high-lights, and look at reference pictures of wood to understand the patterns.
Using a speckled brush to draw some wide but vague lines is a good idea to get the direction of the wood sorted out as a base. Remember that you don’t have to follow the direction of the planks perfectly, but leaving some skewed traces of human errors makes the wood even look more believable.
Paint some dark knot holes where it looks natural to break up the patterns, and then start brushing over the lines again using a thinner, hard edged brush. Make the lines “avoid” the knot holes, so that it looks as if the holes are breaking through the wooden patterns.
To make wood appear old and worn, make the edges cracked and draw cracks out from where nails has been nailed into the wood. Use different colours of yellow and red to avoid monochrome colours.
If you still want to add some more textures, create a new layer, set it to multiply mode, use a hard edged brush with a close to white colour and make a layer style. Tick off Bevel and Emboss, and select the direction to down, and then the direction of where you want the light to appear from. Now you can paint cracks and textures.
Use a layer with multiply mode and a Bevel and Emboss layer style to apply more details in your surfaces, but use a bright colour when drawing to keep transparency.