When creating papers for scrapbooking it is essential to put a little texture on the papers. In real life, the light hits the pulp in the paper in different ways creating variations, highlights and shadows and interest that is hard to recreate. In order to overcome this we can put our own textures on the paper to give variations and allow the eye to find focus. An expanse of solid paper without texture will push the eye to the edges looking for something to concentrate on and will cause the viewer to loose interest in a hurry. Solid paper also detracts from the photos on the paper creating a harsh contrast with sharp edges between the photo and the papers. Texture on the background softens the layout and creates a pleasing effect for the photos.

I started with an image from Burning Well.org, a public domain image source. This image was in the plant category. There are some texture images there as well that you might want to explore, more on how to use those later.

Paste the image into a 12" X 12", 300 ppi document. Notice the image is not large enough to cover the whole page. Go to Edit>Transform>Scale and pull the edges of the image until it covers the whole page. Don't worry about keeping the image in scale. We are not worried about the shape, we want the texture in this image.

Now, lets start playing around with this image to make it into a texture overlay.

Go to Filter>Artistic>Film Grain and use the settings of Grain 4, Highlight 2, Intensity 2 -click OK

Go to Filter>Brush Strokes>Sprayed Strokes and use the settings of Spray Radius 8, Smoothness 9 -click OK

Go to Filter>Texture>Grain and use the settings of Intensity 62, Contrast 83, Grain Type Vertical -click OK

It doesn't look like much right now, but you have the basis for a great texture here. It at this point I begin to check to see what this will look like on a paper. Create a new layer and move it under the layer holding your texture. Fill that layer with the color of your choice.

For the image on the right, I used a rich gold color #d2982c, set the blend mode to Overlay and changed the opacity of the texture layer to 35%

Now lets see about breaking up that circle in the middle and adding a little uniformity to the paper. Duplicate the texture layer and go to Edit>Transform>Rotate 90 CW

To me that looks real good, a lot of texture and a little bit of grunge thrown in. Check it out at actual pixel size and you can see how the different filters and the original image worked together to give a mixture of different shapes of colors in all different tones and values.

But, if you don't want so much grunge, or as much diversity, set the opacity to much lower at about 12% for each texture layer. This is a nice solid color that would make many scrappers happy.

It is important though to view your paper in actual pixels to make sure it will looks good that way also.l

If you put a pattern on this paper you might need to adjust the texture layers a bit. Here I poured a polka dot pattern onto the paper and much of the textural interest disappears. There is still some variation, but not much. If we bring back up the opacity of the texture layers, it overwhelms the polka dots. So something else is called for. By the way, I put the polka dot layer right about the color layer under the textures layers. That way the texture is working on the polka dots as well as the solid background. Also, it helps the dots to merge into the background a little better.

Lets go back to Burning Well.org and this time we will pick up one of the texture images. I chose the gray themed underbrush and put in on the paper in a layer right above the polka dots. Now its time for magic!!

First go to Edit>Transform>Scale and pull all four edges of the image out to the edges of the paper. Then start playing with the Blend modes and the opacity. Duplicate the underbrush image and rotate it and play with the blend modes and opacity on that layer too.

To get these results, I duplicated the underbrush texture four times and flipped and rotated them so that it had equal texture in each corner. Then I played with the blend modes and opacity of each layer until it looked "right" to me. It ended up with the opacity set to 5% for each of the four layers and the blend mode set to overlay.

Below, I went back to the Burning Wells site and got this grass texture. I put it over the paper and then used the Filter Sprayed Strokes to break up the solid lines on it a little. Playing with the blend modes and opacity, I was able to achieve the results on the right without even changing the color of the grass.

Here are some different color variations on what I showed up above. For these, I just put a different color layer under the layers of texture we built and on some of them adjusted the opacity a little. The two solids of course, are without the polka dots. The dark blue almost looks like my husbands blue jeans when he used to work on the cars!