Hi, My name is Roy Stein, and I’m a 3DArtist/ Compositor and illustrator working in an American\Israeli animation studio in Israel. In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how I use Texture manipulation in my painting process, in order to help achieve that realistic, messy look, which is quite difficult to get just by mixing colors in a painting program, not to mention it gives you the ability for shorter deadlines.. The main elements which I use in this technique are the back walls of the cave, the front rock, and the drum/skull. The procedure goes like this:

Step 1:

Scribbling some colors together based on the sepia color scheme I decided on to achieve the atmosphere I want and to construct a basic composition

Step 2:

Creating a displacement map - this by transforming the rough sketch into black and white, and saving it to a different psd file. Here you can see the map I used for the rock.

Step 3:

After doing so, I am taking one of the stone textures from the 3DTotal Total Textures v2 R2, overlaying and displacing it with the displace modifier set on 20 for horizontal and 40 on vertical (using the psd above as a map), the next step is overlaying the displaced layer on top using ‘’pin light mode’’ (on top of the color layer, of course), and setting the curves as needed (I use curves as a different adjustment layer, so I can keep tweaking it till I am happy with it .

Step 4:

Now I am placing another cool stone texture from the same collection under the curves layer, erasing the mask where needed, and giving the texture a colorize filter to make it warmer- and fade the action to 60% (ctrl+shift+f).

Step 5:

More adjusting- painting detail with the eraser in the curve mask to extrude the higher bumps in the cave wall.