Creating a grainy texture using Photoshop and Illustrator

Tame Impalas’ Currents, cover by Robert Beatty

Foreword

In 2016 Robert Beatty revealed how he made the texture for the Tame Impala album on his tumblr. I’m gonna explain the technique in more details here. I don’t think he would mind because he already shared how he does it and plus his work is so imaginative that copying it is actually impossible.

artwork I have made using Beatty’s technique

How to do it

In this tutorial we will create objects in illustrator and then apply the texture in photoshop. I will explain how I created this image :

We start in illustrator, the key to having a cool grainy texture is to create an artwork with gradient :

The bottom one and the background are created using gradients. The sphere is created using the blend tool. And for the top one I used the mesh tool. I might do a tutorial on how to draw those later on.

When you’re done drawing your artwork in illustrator you can save it as png and then open is in photoshop. You can also copy and past in photoshop.

Now comes the texture part, apply filter>pixelate>pointillize and choose the smallest cell size (3). The color will change depending on what foreground and background color you have selected when you apply the filter. Press “d” to make the background/foreground colors default or play around and find whats good for you.

I’m working on a fairly big image (1600x1200). But if you’re working on a smaller image the point will be too small. If you’re working with dpi set at 300 it’s not a problem. But at 72 dpi on a smaller image what I do is I scale the image up by 200%, apply the filter, scale it down by 50%. If you want even finer point you can scale it up by 400%, apply the filter, scale it down by 25%.

Then make your image black and white :

Then you can set the blending more to overlay or soft light :

We are almost done, the last step is add some adjustments to get the right colors/feel. Very important step, play around with color balance, selective color, curves, vibrance, hue/saturation.

Here I used “color balance” to give more definitions to the objects and a warmer feel to the image.

Another way to do this, and the way Robert Beatty does it, is to past objects from illustrator into photoshop and work on each objects separately.

Have fun! (: And follow me dribbble