I've just been pushing on with texturing this manor house. Once I was happy with the brick texture, I was able to get on with the rest of it as many of the other features of the building use the same base colour as the bricks - so that was the first thing I needed to get right.
The way I build up each texture in Photoshop has become something of a routine as well - I begin with a base colour layer which establishes the basic tone of the material. Then I give it texture by using various brushes and sometimes my own photos of real-life materials. The next step is adding a fixed shadow to the areas which would naturally be darker, or areas which I want to always be dark even when affected by lighting. I always set this layer to 'Multiply' so that the texture below it is still visible but also affected by the shadow. On top of that I add a 'grime' or 'dirt' layer, which consists of various brown and green patches created with different brushes to give the affect of natural dirtiness - particularly at the bottom of objects and areas where two parts intersect that would naturally gather grime and dirt from exposure to the elements. This is the process I have been using for the majority of my texture creations.
