#texturing tips

Texturing requires heaps of painting time to render out details. I've spent some time on and off in the last year (when I have time) doing digital painting. So here's a few methods I've employed. A word of warning before using any of these methods, your values/shades must be correct or these techniques may just make your texture worse.

REFERENCE! If this hasn't been drilled into you yet, start doing it. Whilst the character or object you're working on may be from some fantasy realm, it still will be an exaggeration or reference from reality. My character may have green skin, it still could have pores and imperfections, it may be a humanoid, therefore adopting similar anatomy to a human being.  Collect images and put them in a collage to look at whilst you're working.  Getting colours, I'm not particularly confident with my saturations just yet so to see or break down colours I use a filter on a sourced image that suits the area i'm texturing. In this case it was a loin cloth. Use this method to quickly acquire a palette. Remember to make swatches on a corner somewhere to pick from them later. See supplied image:

Quick palettes hey? Texturing/Surface treatment. You painted the texture and now it needs that extra grunge, dirt or texture to give it that convincing look. Source for a texture and scale it relative to the area that needs this. Use a bit of warp and you have yourself a reasonably convincing texture. Erase a bit off in perhaps darker areas as these texture realistically shouldn't be seen in recesses (unless lit somehow)

(Don't go overboard with this and drop the opacity a little) Rounded selections and the lasso, don't underestimate the use of the lasso tool when blocking in details. Instead of using the shapes tool to get rounded corners, you can use even the polygon lasso tool, click select > modify > smooth for rounded corners. 

Post production, every things done but you feel like it needs a bit more to pop. Select all and use copy merged to past everything onto a new layer. This way you keep all your layers and can experiment with a flattened image.  Should some colours be cooler or warmer?

(On left: before,  right is after some adjustments) Experiment with contrast/brightness, hue saturation and curves. Keep in mind that over saturating may make the colours look a bit ridiculous.