Paper / canvas texture overlay

A scan (or a procedural imitation) of a real substrate, laid over flat artwork on a blend mode so the color underneath picks up tooth and fiber. The substrate does the work: cold-press watercolor paper gives you soft dimples, kraft gives warm flecks, newsprint gives cheap fuzz, linen canvas gives a woven weave.

Use multiply when you want the fibers to darken the art (the honest print look) and overlay or soft light when you want texture without shifting the color. Reach for it whenever a design feels too clean: editorial layouts, illustration portfolios, packaging mockups, risograph and zine aesthetics, anything trying to feel made rather than rendered. Opacity between 8 and 20 percent is usually plenty.

Gotcha: multiply kills your whites. Pure white turns gray the moment a texture sits on it, which quietly wrecks contrast ratios on text. Two more traps: a small tile repeated across a hero reveals its grid as a visible checkerboard, so use a large seamless tile or SVG feTurbulence, and a 4MB texture JPEG will cost you more than the effect is worth.