Many people have asked me to tell them how to texture recently. Here I will be sharing my favourite method of creating textures.

Silhouetting is essentially a three step process.

1) Creating the silhouette.
Make the shape of your item. In this case, a diamond sword.
Fill in white the area you want to be wood (in this case, the handle)
Fill in black the area you want to be diamond
Fill in dark grey the area you want darkened diamond.


2) Making the texturemaps
To make texturemaps, pick your colours. In this case, the diamond colours are two shades of blue. The wood colours are two shades of brown. In this case the texturemap was created by rendering clouds then applying dents. This was done for both of them. This is definitely not the only method of creating a texturemap!
Wood:

Diamond:


Here is a darkened diamond texturemap. I used brightness -50, contrast 40 on the initial Diamond texturemap above.


3) Applying the texturemaps to the silhouette
For the wood, copy and paste the wood texturemap in a new layer. Ensure this layer is at the top. Select the white area with the magic wand tool. Invert the selection (in selection options. Marked by blue squares.)
Then, copy the area in your selection. This should be everything except the white part. Paste it over the wood texturemap. Then, merge layer down, or delete the bottom layer.
Do the same with the black area for the diamond texturemap.
Do the same with the dark grey area for the dark diamond texturemap.

The end result:


I deliberately made the sword plain. When texturing, you might want to try something different.
It's all in the silhouette and the texturemaps. Whether you want it to be cartoony, realistic, themed, even futuristic, you can control it all by how you make the silhouettes and the texturemaps.

If you found this useful a diamond would be much appreciated. So would feedback and comments, for that matter.

This blog was created solely by Shiny_Underpants. All elements of it were created by Shiny_Underpants using either notepad++ or Paint.Net