Texture refers to the surface quality of an artwork — whether real or implied. Actual texture is physical and can be touched (thick impasto paint, collage surfaces, sculptural reliefs). Visual texture is the illusion of surface quality created through marks, lines, and value patterns on a flat surface (drawn fur, crosshatched fabric). Both types of texture add tactile richness, direct attention, and help communicate the material properties of depicted subjects.
Do rubbings of real textured surfaces (coins, tree bark, fabric) to understand how texture is built from repeated marks. Then try to recreate those textures freehand using pen or pencil.
You have already worked with line as a mark-making tool and value as the lightness-to-darkness scale. Texture is what happens when those tools are used to evoke the feel of a surface — the roughness of bark, the smoothness of glass, the softness of velvet. It is the visual element that most directly engages your sense of touch, even when you are only looking.
There are two fundamentally different kinds of texture in art. Actual texture (also called tactile texture) is physically present on the surface of the work. Run your hand across a Van Gogh painting and you feel the ridges of thick paint; touch a collage and you feel paper, fabric, and string. Actual texture is built through material choices — impasto paint application, sand mixed into gesso, torn edges, embedded objects. Visual texture (also called implied texture) exists only as an illusion on a flat surface. When you draw crosshatching to suggest rough stone or use stippling to suggest the grain of sand, you are creating visual texture through carefully arranged marks. The viewer's eye reads the pattern of marks and interprets a surface quality, even though the paper itself is smooth.
The connection to your prerequisite skills is direct: visual texture is built from lines and values. Crosshatching is lines laid at angles; stippling is dots of varying value density. Smooth surfaces are rendered with gradual, continuous value transitions. Rough surfaces are rendered with irregular, high-contrast marks. The character of your mark-making — its size, spacing, direction, and consistency — determines what texture the viewer perceives. This is why practicing different mark-making techniques (hatching, cross-hatching, stippling, scribbling, blending) gives you a vocabulary of textures to deploy in your work.
Texture also plays a strategic role in composition. Areas of heavy, complex texture attract the eye and feel visually "loud," while smooth, texture-free areas feel quiet and restful. You can use this contrast to direct attention — placing detailed texture at your focal point and leaving surrounding areas smoother — or to establish spatial depth, since nearby objects typically show more texture than distant ones. Understanding texture as both a material property and a compositional tool gives you one more lever for controlling how a viewer experiences your work.
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