Corrugated Cardboard

This tutorial will show you how to make a 2 inch seamless corrugated cardboard tile which you can then use as a pattern to fill a larger canvas.

Supplies:

Foreground-Background2 Gradient (optional)

1. Open a new canvas 600 x 600 at 300 dpi.

2. Choose #533c29 as the foreground color and #ffffff as the background color.

3. I went into my basement and measured the spacing of the ridges in a piece of corrugated cardboard. The each ridge is 3/16ths of an inch. Therefore, to match reality, a 2 inch piece of digital corrugated cardboard will need 10.6 ridges. I rounded to 11. Go to the fill bucket and then set either the foreground or background material to the foreground-background linear gradient with 11 repeats.
Gradient = Foreground-background
Style = Linear
Angle = 0
Repeats = 11

Addendum: After I finished this tutorial, I decided that I did not like the gradient. So, if you want a more distinctive ripple, I have included a modified foreground-background gradient (Foreground-background2.PspGradient) in the script zip file. Here is a sample of what the other gradient produces. I think it looks more corrugated.


4. Apply the medium hatch texture to the ridges to make the cardboard less smooth and glossy.

Texture = Hatch medium lump
Size = 100
Smoothness =12
Depth = 7
Ambience =0
Shininess =0
Color = White
Angle = 187
Intensity = 50
Elevation = 30

5. Apply a motion blur to soften up the texture.


6. Remove the bright white by reducing the brightness and contrast (Adjust > Brightness and Contrast > Brightness/Contrast or Shift + B).

Brightness = -10
Contrast = -10

7. Use the seamless tile effect to blend the edges.

Tiling method = Mirror
Direction = Horizontal
Horizontal offset = 0
Width = 50
Transition = 50

The corrugated cardboard is now complete and can be used for papers, tags and other projects.


I am including a corrugated cardboard script which makes a 2 inch x 2 inch piece of seamless corrugated cardboard. You can easily modify the script to make a 12 inch x 12 inch piece of cardboard by changing the linear gradient repeats to 69, but if you do not have enough memory, then the script will run very slowly. It is much faster to make the small seamless cardboard tile and then fill a larger canvas. Since I wrote this script while writing the tutorial, it has not been tested in other versions of PSP. If you get this script to work in another version of PSP, please leave a comment.

Script