Alright, so I needed to whip up a camo background the other day. Didn’t want anything too fancy, just something that looked the part for a little project I was messing with.
First thing, I fired up my graphics program. You know, the one I usually use for fiddling with pictures. Stared at the blank canvas for a bit. Okay, camo… what colors? Decided to go for the classic woodland look.
So, I picked out a few colors:
- A couple shades of green, like a forest green and a lighter olive.
- A dark brown.
- A sort of beige or tan color.
Next, I just started making blobs. Seriously, just irregular shapes. Used a brush tool and dotted these colors around the canvas. Didn’t think too hard about placement, just scattered them about. Tried to make sure no one color dominated too much right away.
It looked kinda like messy polka dots at this point. Not very camo-like. So, the next step was to blend things together. I started smudging the edges where the different color blobs met. Used a smudge tool, or sometimes just a soft, low-opacity brush with a different color to overlap the edges slightly. This helped break up the hard lines between the shapes.
It was getting better, looking more organic. But still felt a bit… flat? Needed some texture or noise. I remembered playing with some filters before. Found a ‘noise’ filter and added a little bit, just enough to give it some grain. Then, I duplicated the layer with my color blobs.
On the duplicated layer, I messed around with a ‘clouds’ or ‘difference clouds’ filter. This overlayed a sort of random, cloudy pattern. I set this layer’s blend mode to something like ‘overlay’ or ‘soft light’ and lowered the opacity way down. This really helped make the transitions between the colors look more natural and random, less like deliberate blobs.
Played around with the levels and contrast a tiny bit after that, just to make the darks a bit darker and the lights pop a bit more. Kept tweaking the opacity of that cloud layer until it felt right – subtle, but definitely adding to the effect.
And that was pretty much it. Ended up with a decent-looking, simple camo pattern. Took a bit of back-and-forth, nudging colors and trying different blending effects, but got there in the end. Saved it as a reusable image. Job done.
