Creating a Wood Grain Texture

This tip describes how to create a Wood Grain Texture that you can use in Tile fills.

Version: Any

In a new document, make sure the options Snap to Point and Snap to Guides are turned on in the View menu. Also make sure the measurement units are set to Inches. Next create a palette of the following process colors shown at right. The values you need to enter for the named colors are directly after the name.

Now create a 2" wide by 1.125" tall rectangle anywhere on the page. Fill this in with the Light Wood color. Put Vertical Guides at each of the corners and drag the Zero Ruler guide to the upper Left corner so that the 0's on the Ruler match up with that corner.

Now you need to add 8 Horizontal guides to the rectangle in 3/16" increments. The easiest way to do this is to go into the Guides Editor which can be found under View -> Guides -> Edit. Press the Add button and you'll see a dialog box like above. Choose Horizontal as the guide type. Next choose Add by Increment. Here enter 0.1875 which is 3/16". In the Position fields, enter 0 for First and -1.3125 and the Last. Then click the Add button and it will list all the new guides. Before you click OK, add a - (minus) to the beginning of all the new horizontal guides except the 0 one. For some reason, FreeHand™ doesn't like the negative value entered in the Position part of the Guide editor. Here are all the guides you should see in the editor: Horizontal -1.3125 Horizontal -1.125 Horizontal -0.9375 Horizontal -0.75 Horizontal -0.5625 Horizontal -0.375 Horizontal -0.1875 Horizontal 0 Vertical 2 Vertical 0

Now all of your guides should look like the above example. Yes, you do need the last guide that doesn't actually touch the square, you'll see why later.

The guides that we created will help to make the texture appear "seamless" and somewhat "random". Below I go through the steps in order to create this great looking texture.

1) Using any curve creating tool (Bezigon, Pen, FreeHand), create a 1 point curvy line from the top left guide intersection to the intersection of the second horizontal guide on the right side like above.

2) Continue by creating the remaining lines in the same manner. You should now have 6 lines. Color these lines with the Dark Wood color.

Not squared Squared

3) Now we have to make sure the lines touch each other when we create the finished Tile fill. In order to do that, the end points of each line should be squared with the rectangle edge, like the zoomed example above. The best way to do this is, is to zoom in on the art and select the end points of each line. Since Snap to Guides should be turned on, you can easily move the curve handles to be aligned on the guides like the second example above. Once you have done this, your lines should match perfectly in the finished Tile fill.

4) Now select the lines and Clone them. While still selected, move them slightly below the original lines like above. Now give them the Light Wood color.

5) Next, blend each pair of lines together, using about 5 steps each. Now to add a more random appearance, select the Light Wood colored line in the blend, and reshape it by moving some of the points either up or down. This gives the grain a less static appearance like in the example above.

6) Now to ensure that the top part of the grain blends perfectly with the bottom part of the grain you must Clone the top blend and put it where that extra guide is at the bottom. Make sure the Dark Wood line is lined up perfectly with the guides.

7) Now you can turn off your guides. Select all the blends and shift them up a little like the above example. Cut the blends, then Paste Inside the rectangle.

There! You now have a wood texture that you can use in any shape as a Tiled fill. You can save this file for later use in other art work.

To use this wood grain texture as a Tiled fill, first select, then copy the pattern.

In a new document, create any kind of fillable shape. Choose the Fill Inspector palette and select Tiled fill. Click on Paste in, and you should see a thumbnail of your wood pattern. Your shape should now be filled with the pattern too. Here you can play with the angle of the pattern as well as scale percentages. You can really go nuts with this.

Here I applied the Tile fill to a circle. Then I played around with adding some depth to the shape by giving it a bevel using multiple lens fills. Lastly I added the carving using a Dingbat and again, creating lens fills.

The possibilities don't end here, you can change the wood colors to appear stained or even painted on. Let the creativity fly!  

Example File Download (v7 format) Macintosh Stuffit File fhsource_woodtexture.sit Windows Zip File fhsource_woodtexture.zip