After I completed the image of Apnea - The Knife Thrower's Assistant, I realized the target looked previously unused. It needed a history of knife impacts. After trying to place impact holes manually, I realized I could create a Photoshop brush to scatter the holes around.
I used a stock Photoshop 'sponge' brush squeezed into a slit shape. I turned the scatter way up, and introduced some random rotation. Finally I added some noise and additional image processing to the scatter cloud to give some degree of unique shape to each impact hole, so they wouldn't all look essentially identical.
UPDATE 10/28/2009
I'm starting a flickr set devoted to textures built up with the scatter brush. At the moment I'm interested in faking fiber densities in fiberglass lampshades for thin SSS rendering in Maxwell 2.0 - I want to make some 1950's fiberglass lamps.
