Texturing Originality

When it comes to adding life to a digital piece, many would argue how textures are among the best ways to do so- and a lot of digital artists use stock textures from the net in their work, and I would know, I have done it plenty of times. On the other hand, others prefer to add originality to their work, by capturing the essence of the environment around them in close up and extracting textures that way. That got me thinking: is there a way of taking that a step further? Then the answer came as not a step further, but a lot of steps back- Texture is everywhere, and not just in the closer spectrum of one's vision. Our ocular ability to discern masses and distance all derive in the texture created by the objects clustering together, from trees, to ripples in the water. This realisation meant that I could find textures to be made in any image I had, from landscapes to even portraits. All that I had to do was to seclude those details from the rest of the image. The answer to that came in the form of the Color Range Tool in Photoshop, under the Select menu. And here are the results of my experiment.