Key takeaways
- A texture palette answers a different question from a colour palette: colour decides what hue a shape is, texture decides what the shape appears to be made of.
- A gradient is a smooth transition between two or more colours along a line, which is why it reads as depth or light on a flat region without you having to draw either.
- Glow implies that the object is the light source, so it only works when the surrounding regions are dark enough for the contrast to register.
- Chalk and glass are borrowed from real media and real materials, and each carries expectations about surface: chalk reads as granular and matte, glass as smooth with sharp value jumps.
- Mosaic breaks a region into separate pieces, so it competes with detailed line art and works best on the largest, emptiest shape in the picture.
- One textured region per page is almost always the right dose, because a second one splits attention and a third turns the image into a pattern sampler.
A colour palette decides what hue a region is. A texture palette decides what the region looks like it is made of. They sit next to each other in most coloring apps and they are almost never explained, which is why people either ignore the textured sets entirely or apply four of them to one drawing and wonder why it reads as a mess.
Everything below is about the second kind of choice: what glow, chalk, glass, gradient and mosaic each imply, when a page wants one, and how many one page can carry.
A texture palette changes the surface, not the hue
Take a single region of a drawing and fill it with a mid blue. Now imagine that same mid blue as a gradient running light at the top to dark at the bottom, or glowing outward, or laid down in chalk, or split into small tiles. The hue never changed. What changed is the implied material, and material is what tells a viewer whether they are looking at sky, silk, stone or stained glass.
That is why texture is a stronger lever than hue for a beginner. Choosing between two shades of blue is a subtle decision with a subtle payoff. Choosing between flat and gradient on a large sky changes the whole picture. Our piece on choosing a colour palette for anime art covers the hue half of the problem, and it assumes you have already decided the surface question.
Gradient: a transition, not a colour
A gradient is defined precisely enough that it is worth borrowing the technical definition. The W3C's CSS Images specification calls a gradient "an image that smoothly fades from one color to another," produced by naming colours at points along a gradient line and interpolating between them.
Two consequences follow, and both matter on a drawing.
First, a gradient needs distance. The transition happens along a line, so a shape with no room along that line has nowhere to put the change. On a small region the result reads as an accidental inconsistency rather than a deliberate effect.
Second, a gradient encodes direction. Light to dark going down reads as a surface receding or a shadow gathering at the bottom. The same gradient reversed reads as light from below, which is an unusual and slightly unsettling look. If the rest of your picture is lit from the upper left, a gradient that disagrees will feel wrong before anyone can say why.
Large, mostly empty shapes are the natural home: skies, water, walls, long stretches of fabric, the flat dreamy backgrounds that anime line art tends to include.
Glow: the object becomes the light
Glow is not a brightness setting. It is a claim that this region is emitting light rather than reflecting it, and a viewer reads that claim entirely from contrast with the surroundings.
This is why glow disappoints so often. Applied to a pale figure on a pale background, the glow colours have nothing to be brighter than, and the region simply looks slightly washed out. The fix is never a stronger glow; it is a darker neighbourhood. Push the surrounding regions down in value first and the same glow colours will suddenly read as luminous.
Glow also wants a small target. Eyes, a weapon edge, a magic effect, a window at night, the rim of a moon. A glowing background is a contradiction, because there is nothing left for it to glow against.
Chalk: a real medium with real expectations
Chalk-style palettes borrow from a physical medium, and the physical medium is worth understanding because the expectations come with it. Tate defines pastel as "a coloured drawing medium made from pure coloured pigment mixed with a binder to form a stick," and notes the soft, hard and pencil forms it comes in.
What that means visually is a matte, slightly granular surface where the colour sits on top of a textured ground rather than soaking into it. Edges from a chalk-like treatment are softer than a flat fill and never quite mechanical.
Chalk suits subjects that are meant to feel handled rather than manufactured: fabric, skin in a soft-lit scene, flowers, food, anything cosy. It fights with hard mechanical subjects. A chalk-textured sword blade looks like a drawing of a sword rather than a sword.
Glass: smoothness plus a sharp value jump
Glass-like treatments do something specific and slightly counter-intuitive. What makes a surface read as glass is not transparency; it is a smooth surface interrupted by hard-edged highlights and a sudden value change where the surface curves away.
A gentle gradient with one crisp light stripe across it will read as glass more convincingly than any amount of literal see-through effect, because that is the shape of the visual evidence a viewer uses. This is also why glass and cel shading work together so well: both depend on hard edges, which is the same logic behind cel-shaded hair highlights.
Use it for bottles, gems, water surfaces, visors, ice, and the shiny catchlight in an eye.
Mosaic: a picture made of separate pieces
Tate describes a mosaic as "a picture made up of small parts which are traditionally tiny tiles made out of terracotta, pieces of glass, ceramics or marble." The defining property is that the pieces stay visibly separate, and separation is exactly what makes mosaic the most demanding of these styles to place.
Line art already divides the page into regions. A mosaic treatment divides one of those regions again. Put it next to detailed line work and the two levels of division compete, and the eye cannot settle. Put it on the largest, emptiest shape — a background, a floor, a sky — and it does the opposite: it gives a plain area something to be without adding another subject.
Mosaic also flattens. Because the pieces are discrete, the region loses its sense of curving away from the viewer. That is an advantage for walls and floors and a problem for faces.
How many textures a page can carry
One. Occasionally two, when the second is a gradient, because a gradient is quiet enough not to argue.
The reasoning is simple. Texture is a way of directing attention. Two textured regions issue two instructions, so the eye bounces between them and lands nowhere. Three or more stop reading as a picture with a focal point and start reading as a sampler of available effects.
The practical routine that avoids this: lay every region flat first, look at the whole page, decide which single shape is the emptiest and the largest, and give that one a treatment. Everything else stays flat or takes a gradient.
Matching the texture to the subject
A short summary of where each of these normally belongs, as a starting point rather than a rule. The pairings below hold because each texture implies a material, and a material either suits the subject or argues with it.
| Style | Reads as | Natural home |
|---|---|---|
| Gradient | Depth, light falling across a surface | Skies, water, walls, long fabric |
| Glow | The object emitting light | Eyes, effects, edges, windows at night |
| Chalk | A matte, handled, granular surface | Fabric, flowers, food, soft-lit skin |
| Glass | A smooth surface with hard highlights | Gems, bottles, ice, visors, catchlights |
| Mosaic | Assembled pieces, a flattened plane | Backgrounds, floors, decorative panels |
Anime Coloring Book: Paint Art is our own app, and it puts these styles in the same picker as the pastel, vibrant, classic, warm and cool sets, which is why they are easy to treat as just more colours. They are not. Reaching past the hue sets and into the textured ones is a different kind of decision, and it is worth making deliberately.
The Recently Used row is doing more than you think
A recently-used row looks like a convenience feature. On a page where you have committed to one textured region, it is closer to a consistency check: the colours you have actually been using are visible in one strip, and a strip that has drifted into six unrelated families is telling you the page has no palette.
Use it as a mirror. If the row looks coherent, the picture probably is. If it does not, the problem is upstream of any texture choice, and the place to start is the colour theory basics rather than another effect. More on the choosing side of all this sits in our anime and creative games section.
Good to know
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a colour palette and a texture palette?
When should I use a gradient instead of a flat colour?
Why does my picture look busy after adding textures?
Does a glow style work on a light background?
Sources
- CSS Images Module Level 3 (opens in a new tab)World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) — accessed
- Pastel (art term) (opens in a new tab)Tate — accessed
- Mosaic (art term) (opens in a new tab)Tate — accessed
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