How to use the Texture & Noise Generator
- Pick a texture. The Texture menu has paper and canvas surfaces, four kinds of noise, and three kinds of marks: watercolor, speckle and scratches. The line under the menu suggests a blend mode for each one.
- Shape it. The first two sliders change with the type — Tooth size and Depth for cold-press paper, Scale and Octaves for noise, Speck size and Amount for dust. Contrast, Brightness and Invert then adjust the tones without regenerating the pattern.
- Choose the output. Paper & ink colors paints it in two colors you pick. Grayscale is for Overlay and Soft Light layers. Dark on transparent and Light on transparent make a ready overlay layer with real transparency; Strength sets its maximum opacity.
- Check the repeat. Switch the preview between 1 tile, 2 × 2, 3 × 3 and 100% (one texture pixel per screen pixel), and change the background under it to see how an overlay reads on white, gray or charcoal.
- Download. Download PNG saves one tile at the chosen Tile size, up to 2048 px. Download 2 × 2 tiled saves four copies joined, handy for apps without a pattern fill. Note the Seed or share the link to get the same texture again.
Why generate a texture instead of scanning one
A scanned sheet of watercolor paper carries everything the scanner saw: a light falloff toward one edge, a seam wherever you try to repeat it, a fixed resolution and a fixed scale of tooth. Fixing those by hand takes longer than painting the piece.
A generated texture starts from numbers instead of a photo. Each type here is built from noise defined on a grid that wraps around: the right edge of the tile uses the same random values as the left edge, and the bottom the same as the top. That is what makes every tile seamless by construction rather than by blending or mirroring. It’s also why the Scale slider for noise counts whole cells across the tile — a fractional count would break the wrap.
Paper and canvas go one step further. They generate a height map — hills and valleys of fiber — then light it from the upper left, the way an embossing filter does. Valleys pick up shadow and the faces turned toward the light go bright, so the result reads as a physical surface instead of a gray haze. The marks types (fibers, dust, scratches) are drawn as strokes and dots, with every mark near an edge repeated on the opposite side.
Everything is calculated in your browser, so the same seed and settings always give the same pixels.
How octaves translate into pixels
Fractal noise stacks layers called octaves. Each octave has twice as many cells across the tile as the one before and half the strength. With Perlin fractal noise at a scale of 4 cells:
| Octave | Cells across | Feature size, 1024 px tile | Feature size, 2048 px tile |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 | 256 px | 512 px |
| 2 | 8 | 128 px | 256 px |
| 3 | 16 | 64 px | 128 px |
| 4 | 32 | 32 px | 64 px |
| 5 | 64 | 16 px | 32 px |
| 6 | 128 | 8 px | 16 px |
So on a 1024 px tile, six octaves bottom out at 8 px blotches, and a seventh or eighth octave adds only fine fuzz. The generator skips octaves smaller than 2 px because they would be invisible. If a cloud texture looks too smooth on a big canvas, raise the tile size before adding octaves.
Which texture for which job
| Texture | Output | Blend mode | Starting opacity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cold-press paper | Dark on transparent | Multiply | 30–60% |
| Hot-press paper | Paper & ink colors | Normal, as the bottom layer | 100% |
| Fine grain | Grayscale | Overlay or Soft Light | 10–30% |
| Canvas weave | Grayscale | Soft Light | 30–50% |
| Watercolor bloom | Dark on transparent, colored ink | Multiply | 50–80% |
| Speckle & dust | Light on transparent | Screen | 40–70% |
| Ridged noise | Grayscale, inverted | Overlay | 20–40% |
The Layer Blend Mode Previewer shows how each of these modes treats a texture before you commit to one in your painting app.
Tips from practice
Clear the base before making an overlay. In the transparent outputs, any tone in the flat areas becomes a faint veil over the whole painting. Push Brightness up until the flat paper is fully transparent and only the tooth or the marks remain.
Match the tile to the canvas. A 1024 px tile repeats almost three times across a 3000 px canvas, and the eye finds repeats quickly in clouds and blooms. Use 2048 px for print canvases, or rotate every other copy 90° when you lay tiles by hand.
Keep grain at 1:1. Grain only looks like grain when one texture pixel lands on one canvas pixel. Scaling a grain layer up softens it into mush; scaling it down averages it away. Generate it at the size you need instead.
Use the pattern tools your app already has. In Photoshop, open the PNG and choose Edit → Define Pattern, then apply it with a Pattern Fill layer so you can change scale and blend mode later. In Procreate, use Actions → Add → Insert a file and set the layer’s blend mode.
Write the seed into the file name. Downloads already include the type, size and seed. When a client asks for the same paper texture on the next illustration, the seed brings it back exactly.