Texturizing your illustration: Adding authentic distress

Now the next use of textures I want to show you, is all about really adding an authentic kind of hand-done quality to the artwork. A few years back I was invited to be part of an art show. And I had to create some actual gallery quality art that could hang up and be ran out on canvas and framed. And I created this art you see in front of me. It's called temporal infestation. What does it mean? I have no clue. I just wanted to draw something weird and this is kind of what came out. But, I didn't wanna just take these vectors, that's all these are, just vector shapes. It's a segmented style by the way. I didn't wanna just run it out, cause it just look like a large color print. And I want it to look more authentic and feel more traditional in, in essence. Even though it was a digital illustration, now this also goes back to layering your files. Layering makes, doing certain things far easier. And on this file I can toggle off the foreground image so all I have is this background image. Now the whole reason I do this especially in context of this project is I wanted to introduce a splatter texture, so I'm gonna turn that on, and once again this texture was derived from a parking garage wall. That's where this came from.

And I just scanned it in and colorized it, this hue of, kind of a burnt orange. An that has been, simply just applied to the layer above my background, just to eat away. An if I turn on my primary art you can see how it starts to, interact. So, that's how that works. If I select that layer, you can see that I've applied under the transparency palette to multiply, once again wherever the color goes over a background color, you're gonna get some interaction and it will multiply.

If I zoom in on this area right here, you'll see how it changes subtly as it goes over different planes of color. And that's the effect you're after there. It just adds depth and dimension. And so, I added that splatter texture to the background. Now another aspect of really giving this an authentic flair is to kind of shift the whole color scheme by using a texture. And I did that on this one. By scanning in an old piece of paper.

This is like a water stained document and I'm going to now use this, and I've masked this into the shape. I scanned it in, so proportionately it was pretty close, but if I click on the actual image, you can see it's a little bigger. I have it masked in to that shape. So this scanned in parchment basically it's a water stained parchment. I'm gonna use to colorize my whole illustration. So with this selected, I'm gonna go to the transparency palette and I'm gonna use the blend mode of multiply. So once you do that, you immediately see how it interacts with the art. And it just adds all this nice like distressed quality, like it's been sitting somewhere and it's gotten stained. And I like the way this is looking, but it's a little too intense. I, I don't want it to, to diminish the art this much. So I'm gonna knock that back a bit. And just use about a 60% opacity on that and hit that. And I think that looks better so we still get that nice quality where it looks aged, and it looks stained. And it's right over the top of everything so it's interacting with all those colors nicely. So, that's how I do that. Now, because I'm gonna run this out on a canvas substrate, digitally, I wanted to give an authentic look that some of that surface pigment on this artwork has rubbed off. So what I did is, I scanned in some canvas texture.

And I used it and just interspersed it around this illustration so it gives that effect of it wearing off. So if I zoom in a little bit, so you can see this a little more. You can see if I toggle on and off the scuff marks, that's just to give it that authentic flair that some of that pigment has been brushed away. It's kinda worn off over time, and that, once again, gives it that authentic look and adds to the character of the overall piece, using these textures. Now the last bit of texture I wanted to use is, I didn't want this to crop off the edge of the frame as a full frame piece of artwork. I wanted to frame it in a way where it almost looked hand painted. So once again I took another texture that a friend of mine actually created. And it was created with a wooden roller with ink, and I took that and I made a frame from it. So if I turn off all these layers you can see this is all this is.

The center is transparent so it shows through to the artwork. The only texture is this frame. So I'm basically using this to mask out all the edge. So If I turn everything back on now. You can see how that looks, but I am going to select this texture and I am going to colorize it white. And you get this awesome effect that I painted this whole thing because as it gets to the edge it looks like the brush has, you know, gone dry, and you get that dry brush effect. This is how you can use textures with vector art to really create a unique kind of hand done quality. Now when this ran out on canvas, it was 48 inches by 48 inches and when it comes out on canvas because it's canvas it already has a nice texture to it. And then to even add another layer kinda interactivity to it, I painted clear acrylic paint on top of it to give authentic brush marks, even though it's not painting it's vector. And the whole thing came out pretty cool, so this is how I use textures in vector art.

Within the exercise files for this course, there's a free high res texture sets, so you can immediately start using them. But I also encourage you to just get in the habit of creating your texture library, because it's a resource you won't use once, you'll use it your whole career, and you can keep adding to it. And that's the best part about doing it. I love textures. I go out of my way to collect them. And I use them in my art whenever I can and I think once you start experimenting with textures in your own illustrations you're going to fall in love with surfaces and you're going to see how it's going to make your art look incredibly awesome, so have fun with it and enjoy some texture exploring.