Blender Tutorial for Beginners: How To Make A Mushroom

Coloring the Mushroom

Coloring an object in Blender is done in three steps:

• Applying a material
• Unwrapping the mesh into a 2D texture that you can paint on (called a UV wrap)
• Painting on the UV wrap

Applying a Material

Start off with activating the Material Properties tab in the Poperties region.

The Material Properties tab contains a list of materials available to the selected object. Time to add the first material to the mushroom! Click the New button below the list, you’ll see a new material appear in the list with a bunch of material properties below it:

The material is currently named “Material.001”. Give it a more descriptive name by clicking the material name and type in “Mushroom” followed by Enter to confirm the name change.

There are lots of ways you can change your material, but leave it as-is for now, since you’ll be adding a texture later in this tutorial.

Unwrapping a Mesh

The next step is to unwrap the mesh so that you have a flat “canvas” to paint on. This is much like peeling an orange and laying the peel down flat on a table.

The easiest way to start the unwrapping process is by switching to the UV Editing workspace. You can switch workspaces by clicking on the tabs at the top, so click on the one that’s labeled UV Editing.

A workspace is a predefined region layout. Up until now you’ve been modeling in the Layout workspace, which is meant for general modeling tasks. The UV Editing workspace is split into two main regions: an UV Editor and a 3D View in Edit Mode.

Right now the UV editor is blank because you haven’t unwrapped anything yet. Place your cursor in the right-hand window and hit A to select all vertices. You might notice that the UV map on the left is displaying the default map for a cylinder now, since that gets generated automatically when creating a new mesh. That map won’t be usable though, since it doesn’t match the mushroom mesh. That would be like trying to wrap a nice poster around a plush doll, lots of weird bends all over the place.

Time to create a brand new UV map! Imagine your model as if it’s made out of paper and you need to make cuts in it along the edges until you can lay it out flat on a table in separate pieces. That’s basically the gist of what UV unwrapping is, fully mapping a 3D object to a 2D image.

The “cuts” in this case are called seams, just like the ones you’d find on your clothes or plushies. To start creating seams, you need to be in Edge Select mode first, so click on the Edge Select button in the 3D View Header or press 2 on your number row.

Deselect all edges by double tapping A. Next, select these four edge loops by holding ALT/Option and clicking the edges:

Now right click and select Mark Seam. You’ll notice that those edges have become bright red.

Blender can now figure out where to cut into the model to create a flat UV map. To update the UV map on the left based on the seams you made, press the A key to select all edges followed by U and select Unwrap.

You’ll now see a map similar to this in the UV Editor:

Creating the Texture

Now that you have unwrapped the mesh, you need to add an image for the mesh to be mapped to. This is like drawing or painting on the “paper pieces” you laid out on the table while having a copy of the original model that’s linked to the pieces, reflecting everything you do.

Click the New button in the header of the UV Editor on the left to start creating an image texture.

A small menu pops up for you to fill in, leave everything at their default values except for the name, put “MushroomTexture” in there and click OK.

The background of the UV Editor now becomes black, this is the image you just created. Before you start editing the image, it’s a good idea to save it as an image next to your .blend file. Select Image ► Save in the header (or press Alt/Option + S) and press the Save As Image button to save the image as a PNG.

Preparing the Material

You might have noticed that the mushroom still looks pretty gray. This is because the base color in its material is still set to a solid white color. To link your texture to the mushroom’s material, open the Material Properties tab in the Properties section and click the small yellow button next to Base Color. A selection menu will open up, select Image Texture here so Blender knows the colors will come from an image texture.

Next, click the image dropdown button left from the New button and select MushroomTexture.

Now switch to the Texture Paint workspace by clicking the tab with the same name at the top of the Blender window.

Now the mushroom looks pitch black and is finally ready for painting!

Using Your Brush

The Texture Paint workspace consists of two regions: an Image Editor in Paint Mode on the left and a 3D View in Texture Paint Mode on the right. The Image Editor is used to paint onto your texture, while you can paint directly on the 3D model in the 3D View.

Time to add a splash of color to this mushroom!

Right now, the edges of your virtual brush hold a lot less paint than the center, while you want more of a permanent marker at this point, nice and full. To achieve this, change the falloff curve of your brush in the Properties region to be a straight line by clicking the Falloff menu open en choosing the last icon in the series.

Now you’re ready to do some painting, choose a color you like in the color picker wheel. I’m going with a bright red. You can click the color on the left for a more detailed color menu where you can set the saturation or even the hex value.

With your color chosen, click and drag over the mushroom in the 3D View to paint its cap. Rotate the view around and zoom in and out to get a good look at what you’re doing. You can change the size of the brush by pressing the F key, moving your cursor until you found the right size and clicking to confirm.
Don’t worry if the color get somewhere you don’t want it, you can use CTRL/Command + Z to undo your last action, or just leave it as-is and fix it in the next steps!

Here’s how mine looks like after adding this first color:

If you take a look at the UV map, that could be a piece of art by itself!

Now for the rest of the mushroom, I’m going with an off-white color, but feel free to choose any color you like.