Drawing and painting textures

What is texture in drawing and painting?

This guide was produced in partnership with Art Fund

There are two types of texture:

• actual texture that you can feel
• visual texture that you can see

When you make a drawing or painting with texture, you are showing how something feels.

You can use different kinds of marks that show texture in your artwork.

Exploring texture in art

There are lots of different types of texture. Things can be:

• smooth or rough
• hard or soft
• wet or dry
• matt or shiny

Try looking at and feeling some different types of objects in nature or around you (but avoid sharp edges or spikes that might hurt you). How do the objects feel?

The same rules about texture apply to drawings and paintings.

You might want to make the things you draw look as if they are rough, like an old piece of wood.

You might also want to make something look as if it is smooth, like a stone on the beach.

You can show how objects feel in your artwork by experimenting with different techniques.

Techniques for drawing texture

To make texture in a drawing, you will need some pencils or crayons.

There are different types of pencils.

• Some are marked with an H (for hard).
• Some are marked with a B (for black).
• Some are known as HB pencils (a mix of hard and black) and are good for drawing and writing.

Hard and soft pencils produce different types of marks.

• H pencils make fine lines.
• B pencils are usually soft and make darker lines.

If you only have one type of pencil, you could also use wax crayons or felt tips.

Watch: How do artists show texture?

Which words would you use to describe the textures that these artists show?

If you were going to show these textures using your pencils or crayons, what techniques would you use?

Activity

You will need a sheet of paper and a wax crayon (or a pencil).

Make some texture marks on the paper. With each pencil or crayon, you could make some:

• small and large circles
• zig-zags
• dots and dashes
• a mix of straight neat lines and rough messy lines

Which pencils worked best for each texture?

You could now try making a drawing that shows the texture of an object you can see around you.

Quiz

Glossary

Here are the meanings of some important words.

Actual texture - A texture you can feel.
HB pencil - An average pencil. HB means 'hard and black'.
Texture - How something feels.
Visual texture - A texture you can see.
Contrast - A big difference between two or more things when you compare them.