Any surface has a texture. A metal surface is smooth, some cat fur is fluffy, dogs with short hair look smooth, and so on.

Now for the tricky part.

The farther away from things you are, the more everything can be seen as a texture. So, a meadow looks like a mass of short and tall weeds with many textures when you’re standing in the middle of it, but from a distance the same patch of meadow has an over-all texture.

This gets a bit confusing when drawing because our minds “know” that a meadow is made of short and tall grass and we try to draw it that way when in reality, depending on the distance, it could look very smooth and not “weedy” or multi-textured at all.

And that leads us to first rule of drawing realistically.

Drawing Rule No. 1 – Draw what you see and not what you think you see.

I like to draw most textures by filling the area with a medium value hatch, and then adding the shadows and erasing the highlights.