Vector Textures: Create Your Own Grunge Textures

1. Intro: Hey, it's Jeremy, designer and illustrator from Sydney. Today I'm going to be showing you how to create your own set of vector textures. It is going to be a lot of fun. What we are going to do, I am going to show you two methods of creating textures. One will be image tracing in Illustrator and the other one will be creating higher-resolution tiffs, that you create in Photoshop and you can bring it into Illustrator. So what we are going to do is take some photos and we're going to use those photos and really manipulate them, add adjustments in Photoshop, create it the way we want to look like. Then we are going to take it into Illustrator and make it into a cool texture that can be used on your logo designs, or your branding projects, or whatever projects you use. It's going to be a lot of fun. Click Enroll and I hope to see you inside the class. 2. Taking the Shots: I went outside to my backyard. If you don't have a big backyard, you can ask around your house, or look around and you'll find materials that you can use. You literally can make textures out of anything, as long as there's enough light and contrast and it has a nice texture to it, then you can use it. I just went in my backyard. I was looking around where we have stacks of wood, and bricks, and metal sheets, and rusty old pipes, and stuff. I looked around behind the garage as well, and found some cool spots, just going through all the materials and found what I thought would work well. I found some cool things. I went down to the shed later on as well and I found some other things as well, but I was really looking for in a grungy, rusty old things that we have in our backyard like metal, and wood, and just random stuff. Just look around, pay attention, and you'll find stuff that you can make some cool textures out of. 3. Photo Selection: Before we start jumping into creating textures, what we need to do going to do is we're going to take some photos. I use the camera for this, but you can use your normal camera phone or whatever you have to take pictures. That's going to be useful anyway. What we're going to do is, we're going to take pictures, look for materials outside your backyard or even in your house. What I tried to look for is like metals, wood, fabric, anything that has a nice texture or even rust or grunge, things that have nice details or even some old vintage things. Just look around, find some cool stuff that you can use and you'll be surprised what you find. What we're looking for really when we're taking these photos is, we want to look for things that have high contrast and make sure there's enough sufficient light in the image or else the details won't come out nicely. I'm going to show you some images I took. These are the ones I picked after taking pictures outside. I took some of the metal scraps, some barrels, some weed fabrics, some wood even and really I was pleased with these images. You can see this one has details in it, it's pretty cool. This is fabric. This won't be hard because there's not much lighting in this image, so it won't come as I want. These is cool with rust. You can see there's a controversy between the white cream background and this really dark, rusty color. Let me take it into Photoshop. We're going to make it black and white. These really dark areas are going to come out and you want that black detail to come up with that rust and the dust and stuff, so that's really useful. This one is cool, this one might be really nice as well, this is pretty cool as well, it's got some nice chunk of a dark area and these lighter orange areas on the outside would come up as white which is really cool. This might be a little bit harder, but you can see how I'm trying to look for patterns, things are going to be useful, even this wood might come out nice. You can see how these dark areas are, these lines in the grain might come out. But I can see that there's some contrasts between these cuts in the wood end the slide up wood shades in the back. That's what we're looking for when taking these photos. Once you've taken these photos, we're going to jump into Photoshop and manipulate them so that we can start making our cool textures. 4. #1 Image Tracing: Once you've imported your images, try and save them as a JPEG and at a decent resolution so we can get as much detail out of it as possible. What I'm going to do, I'm going to pick this one. Try and pick the one that has the most contrast and just drag it into Photoshop just like that and it'll load up. It should work. I'm using CC, but it should work in CS6 and CS5, and so on. We've got our image here and what we're going to do is change the image mode. Go at the top left-hand corner and click "Image." Then we're going to go down some "Mode" and click "Grayscale." Now we can see we're just dealing with the whites and the blacks and the grays. This will allow us to edit it and see where we can find the most detail. After we've done this, you'll see how it changes. We're going to go to the bottom right-hand corner and click on this little button there on the bottom, and this will bring up our adjustments and effects. You can see how we've got brightness and contrast, levels, curves, exposure. These are the main ones we're going to be using. I usually just start off with levels. Click that and you'll get this box. If you do not know how to get the box, go to "Window" and you can select "Properties" and you'll get this box. Now, I'm just going to start playing with the blacks. You can see if you drag this slider, this brings in the darker tones and this slider at the top here brings in the high tones. What do they call them? They call them the light tones and this one is the mid tones pretty much. You can play around with these and you can see the more you drag this in, the more the dark spots you want and you want to try and get that contrast that can be set up. You can see if I drag this down, you'll get more scratchiness or if you want more bigger blobs of dots or dust, then bump this up. To figure it out, just play around with it, see what you like, what you don't like, how much detail you want. That should be fun. Usually, sometimes I might go to "Curves" or add a brightness and contrast. I'm just going to go to "Curves" and I couldn't stop playing around with this a bit more to get what you like. The good thing about these adjustment layers is you can always turn them off and you can always go back. Just double-click on this little symbol here, and you can go back and edit them the way you want. Really simply like that. You can save it and always come back to it later and change it. Once you've done this, we're going to go to "File" and then let's go to "Save As." I'm just going to go select "JPEG." I'm just going to save this as Blackandwhite, just like that, and just press "Okay." Now we've got our texture in our folder. As you can see here, I'm also drag into Illustrator now. Jump into Illustrator now, drag this in. I'm going to scale it down a bit. Put on your iPad and then you can see now at the top here it says "Linked File" and it's got a JPEG. And it shows you the PPI and we can embed it. We can either edit it or image trace. We want to image trace. You click "Image Trace" there, or if it's not opening up go to "Window" and then find image trace. Where is it? There. You'll get this box. You can see it's an image how it's got across. That means it's an image. What we're going to do is trace it. I'm going to click "Trace" and you will see the Illustrator starts turning into anchors and points. You can really if zoom in it's turning into a vector. But instead of vector here we have to expand it. Well, first off, what we're going to do is going to change it and make some edits. I'm just going to untick preview, just so it doesn't lag. What I need you to do at, you should take snap off curves and lines. Clicking "Ignore White" why you want to do that? So it becomes transparent. What we can do now is we can actually edit these bars, all these parameters here. We've got threshold paths, corners and noise. Usually I'll bump up the noise if you want some more specs and dust in more detail. The corners really makes the shapes more sharper or rounder. Paths means more detail, but it does increase the anchors. An important point to note that you can see down at the bottom here it's got paths and anchors. At the moment it has 34,000, which is okay. But if we bump up the paths or if we bump up the threshold, these two things are going to increase the detail and that's going to make it have more anchors and points which can make your Illustrator lag and sometimes it may crash. Just got to be careful of that. I'm going to tick "Preview" and just so you guys can see what it does. I'm going to bump the noise. You see it starts loading. I'm going to bump the noise a bit and you see every time you move it, it's going to change it and affect it, that's why it's good to turn off preview so it doesn't lag. You can see now if I zoom in, it's got more of these specs and has a more textually feel, instead of just only big blobs, it's got more details in it. You can play with it around as much as you want. You can play with the threshold. Pump that up a little bit. We'll see what that looks like and it's really fun here. There's no rules. You just going to play around and change as much as you like. I guess that's looking around and what I'm going to do now, I'm going to select a go to the top left-hand corner and you'll see expand, click "Expand." Now you can see it's all point and it's actually a vector. We can save these, we can drag it. We can change the color if you want and do whatever. This is how you create a vector texture using a photo and through image tracing. It's really simple to do guys. This is how I make some grungy textures in Illustrator and it's really fun. I hope you guys enjoyed this part. I'm going to show you the second method in the next video. 5. #2 Creating Tiffs: The second method of creating a cool texture that we can use any Illustrator, is creating a high resolution TIFF. What we're going to do, we've got our image, and if you follow the method one, you'll have this image or the one that you've been using, or you can make a new one, and go for the same process, change the image mode to grayscale, and then edit the levels and the curves, as we did in the last video and we're just going to reuse this. Instead of saving it as a JPEG, what we're going to do is we go to the top left-hand corner, go to image, go to mode, and we're going to click Bitmap. Make sure it's on a grayscale, or else you won't be able to select Bitmap. I'm going to click bitmap, it's going to ask you to flatten layers, press okay, and you can see here, we get an option to change the output. Pixels per inch, this is how much of the resolution we can change. Seventy two is the standard for screen sizes or screens, but if you want to make it higher, 300 is usually the normal for print, but sometimes people save it as a 1,000 PPI or whatever. I'm just going to select 300 DPI, for now, but you can always change that. Leave this on diffusion dither. You can play around with these settings, but I just usually use this one on this setting, I press okay. Now let's turn this into a bitmap. As you can see that layer is a flatten, is just one image, and we can use like that, and you can see how it's got all the details there if you zoom in, which is pretty cool. Now what we're going do, we're going to go to File and we're going to go to Save As. Now we're going to save it as a TIFF. What a TIFF allows us to do is to make it editable, it allows us to keep it as editable file that we can use in Photoshop and Illustrator and allows us to use it as a normal texture. I'm going to save this as metal rust, and you can see how we got some settings. Just copy these setting C. This is what I use, so you want to leave it on that and leave these ticked just as that. So press okay and now it should save as a TIFF. We're going to get back to my files. You can see I've got the folder here, the file here and I'm just going to drag it into Illustrator. Boom! Just like that. Now you can see this is a high resolution TIFF. At the top, if I go to the left-hand corner, you can see it's a dot TIFF, and it gives you the PPI which is the Pixels Per Inch, which is 300 that we just saved. We can add the image trace it, or embed it, or use it as a normal file. But instead of image tracing it, what we can do is just leave it and use it as a normal texture. I can select these and actually change the colors if I want, just like a normal textual would. The good thing about reusing a TIFF is that it wont lag your computer. It doesn't create points and anchors, which will make your Illustrator a lag. It actually keeps it as a TIFF which is editable. We can change colors, we can re-size it as well, which is really handy. This is another handy method that I use when I'm crediting textures and I think it's going to really help you out. 6. Prizes: I'm going to be giving away a prize this month. If you apply your project before the end of October, I'll be giving you a prize called the Turbo Badge Builder. It's a product to be working on I want to be selling it online. [inaudible] , and I want to give it away to two students who upload their projects. Make sure you update your project, share it, show your process, and I'll pick two random students by the end of the month, by 31st of October, and I'll send that to you and I hope you guys enjoy it. Armenian strategy, use it. It's pretty much a legged credo. And Craig who badges, but you're bad. It's really fast. It's got patterns, styles, tension, all this cool stuff in it. I'll be happy to give that a white, I'll look forward to seeing your projects and thanks for joining in the class.