Plastic Textures

Open a new window approx. 300 x 300 pixel, with a white background. (Don't worry, we're not going to use this on the web, so size doesn't count right now.)

Using the Spray Paint tool, paint a large x, extending all the way to the corners, in the middle of the window. For the example, I used:

brush shape: round
size 150
opacity 43
density 100
hardness 0
step 1

I used a foreground color setting of 255,64,5 and a paper texture of sidewalk.

To create the texture, we'll use the Smudge Tool.

left slash
size: 158
opacity: 100
density: 100
hardness: 0
step: 1
paper texture: none

Starting in the middle of the window, smudge to the bottom left corner. Release the mouse button and go back to the middle of the window. Now smudge to top right corner. That leaves the top left corner and bottom right corner undone. Following the same diagonal, start in the middle of the undone corners and smudge down then up.

Crop a good size square out of the center. The purpose of the crop is to remove any overly white areas that didn't smudge well. If you're satisfied with your image, you can skip this part. But it's better to crop than to try and patch a small corner that'd didn't smudge well.

Set your foreground color to white and add a hot wax coating to the image. (Image | Other | Hot Wax Coating)

Yuck! Why is my image red? Why aren't my highlights white? This doesn't look anything like the example! The secret ingredient, and final step for your texture is to go to
Colors | Negative Image on the menu bar. Wahlah! Light blue texture with white highlights.

Save your textures to a separate "texture" folder. When you want text or an object to be made with this texture open it and use the Fill Tool to pour it into your image.

Vary the effect by using a different color as the foreground color when hot wax coating. Don't forget to negative color afterwards if you want the white highlights.