Tutorial- How to use texture in SAI (brush method)

Based on lillym0n's tutorial on livejournal: http://lillym0n.livejournal.com/34829.html?thread=739085

On PaintToolSAI, you can add texture only to your brush/airbrush/marker/pen/*insert tool here* strokes. For this tutorial's sake, let's call it a brush stroke.

A normal brush stroke:

A brush stroke with texture:

"How on earth do you do that?", you may question. Well, this is how:

1) Download some textures to use.

There are softwares such as NeL TexGen Editor where you can make your own, but you can also search on Google for premade textures made by artists.

There are 4 types of texures you can download and use:

->blotmap    for brush border texutres

-> brushtex  for brush stroke textures

->elemap     for canvas textures

->papertex  for brush form and stroke

Make sure you know which type you're downloading.

Here's some textures you can start with: http://www.mediafire.com/?3tmfokum3mw

2) Extract files

You may need to extract the texturs you've downloaded (you'll need an extracting porgramme such as WinRAR). The textures I've downloaded looks like this:

Select all the textures by dragging your mouse until they're all highlighted. Right click on the selected area, click on "Extract to specificied folder", choose where you want to save them and click "Ok".

Here's my extracted folder:

Sometimes the names of the textures will be in gibberish, so rename them something that makes more sense.

4) Open your PaintToolSAI folder

5) Copy and paste your textures into the relevant folders

If you downloaded brushtex textures, copy and paste into the brushtex folder, and so on. You may alrady have basic textures installed such as Paper and Canvas.

Here's the texutres I've chosen to use (WatercolourA, WatercolourB, Water1 and Spot2):

6) Go back to the PaintToolSAI folder

Now open the coding file that realtes to your texture type. I'm using papertex, so I'm going to edit the papertex file. I don't know why elemap isn't on mine- if you're using elemap, try using the papertex file.

Windows users- If your computer doesn't recognise the file type, right click and select "Open with Notepad"

Your coding file should look something like this:

Becuase Canvas and Paper were default textures, their coding is already there.

7) Add coding for your new textures

This may seem compliacted but is really very, very simple. You basically write a new line for each texture, but instead of "Paper" or "Canvas", you type the name of your texture. Make sure the spelling and spaces for the texture name is corret.

Model code: 1\*texture type*,*texture name*.bmp

For example, if I added the papertex texutre WatercolourA, I would type: 1,papertex\WatercolourA.bmp

So here's my added codes:

8) Use your textures!

If you already had SAI open, you may have to close it and open it again to see your new textures. Textures are displayed in these areas:

The scale tool will change the size of the texture and the tool next to it will change the density of the texutre:

The density of your brush and opcaity of the layer will aslo chnage how the texture looks:

Go crazy, mess around and have fun adding textures to your artwork!