Identifying, Describing and Creating Texture

These worksheets address Texture and force students to look around them for texture in their world. Texture is all around us and so often gets overlooked. often students will tell me that some objects have no texture, when in fact "smooth" is a texture and that is what they really should give as an answer.  Perhaps a list of texture words would be of some help to students new to identifying and describing surfaces. For instance, you would not say that a stone is stoney. Some students fall into the trap of naming the object rather than the texture. How would you describe etching on a glass bottle or mirror? 

Textures: Bumpy, Smooth, Rough, Gritty, Slick, Silky, Soft, Prickly, Fuzzy, Hard, Woven, Rigid, Jagged, Chalky, Pasty, Bristly, etc.

Some textures need further explanation like woven. A woven texture could be fine or coarse. 

Some textures can be summed up using another word like the stiff and prickly hairs on a pig can be described as bristly. Depending on your students or your audience, you might prefer stiff and prickly or bristly. 

Try giving the students an ogject that has multiple materials to describe. the object might have several smooth surfaces. Try to get the students to differentiate between the smooth surfaces to push them further into their texture description. You can use the example of house or spray paint. Paint now comes in several different finishes; Matte, Eggshell, Semi-Gloss, Satin, and High-Gloss. Grab a few paint chips from the nearby paint store and have the students figure out the textures before telling them to see what words they come up with.

Creating texture is very different than describing texture. Rubbing over objects with texture can provide some help to creating a desired texture. I use the example of wood. To obtain a wood texture in a drawing, you can't merely rub over a piec of wood. This doesn't work well at all. copying the texture of a piece of wood by providing varied values of brown tends to work best. To make a sandy beach, colring over a piece of sandpaper and shifting it several times with varied shades of tan works well.

This worksheet requires students to mimic surfaces in nature attempting to get them to pay attention to detail. I usually follow this up with a turtle rendering exercise posted prior.