16 Free Autumn Textures

Sixteen beds of dried leaves and seed heads, each one shot square-on from above and lit flat, so the veins keep their relief without any corner going brighter than the rest. Fourteen materials in all: oak, birch, beech, ginkgo, plane, mixed forest floor, bracken fern, dried twigs, meadow grasses, wheat ears, poppy seed heads, hydrangea, bay leaves and rose petals. Oak and the twigs come as two variants each, shot differently enough to be worth having both.

That flat, even lighting is the whole point of the set. It means you can drop a texture over artwork on Multiply or Overlay and have it read as a bed of leaves, not as a photograph of leaves lying on a table with a lamp somewhere off to the left.

These are not seamless tiles. Each file is one continuous surface at 4096 x 3072, wide enough that you rarely need to repeat it.

Not everything sits in an autumn palette. The bay leaves are green and the hydrangea is pink. They are here because they behave like the rest of the set - flat, dense, filling the frame edge to edge - and because rust and ochre are not always what a layout needs.

To use one: place the texture on the top layer, set the Blending Mode to Multiply for a printed-on-paper look or Overlay to keep the veining without the tonal shift, then pull the Opacity back until it sits. Against dark artwork, Screen picks out the pale seed heads and the ginkgo. Desaturate first if you want the structure without the colour - the denser materials, the wheat and the poppy heads, hold up well in greyscale.