Tutorial: How To Make Any Texture Look Painterly In Blender

If you're interested in creating stylized 3D art, a new tutorial from SouthernShotty is worth checking out. Inspired by the Kuwahara compositor effect, his material works directly in the Shader Editor, which means your textures can have a painted look before you add lighting, compositing, or other NPR effects.

SouthernShotty explains how to build the entire system from scratch, showing how it samples nearby pixels, finds smoother areas, and uses those colors to create painterly shapes. He also turns the setup into a reusable node group with a simple intensity control.

Just be warned: the video opens with some Minecraft footage. For those who want to go further, SouthernShotty has other videos on painterly 3D, including a guide on creating a stylized fur and feather system:

He's also made a video explaining how Thin Wall mode works in Blender 5.2 LTS.

We have plenty of stylized 3D tutorials in Blender on our site. For example, check out Edutaker's video on creating line art, watch Omar Faruq Tawsif's guide to seamless texture painting, or explore crzyzhaa's tutorial on creating simple low-poly models with a stylized look.

lassyla also has a cool guide on creating a hand-painted-looking shader without any actual hand-painting:

Also, in case you missed it, we've got a few highlights from Blender 5.3. There are several new nodes that let you create custom material lighting:

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