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Lesson Info

Adding Textures to Illustrations

The next thing I wanna talk about is adding texture to your illustrations. You are able to make your own textures but there's a huge market for them online, you can purchase your own textures and brushes. So I wanna show you what I'm gonna be using today and then walk you through the steps on how to install those on Illustrator. So what I want to show you is Creative Market. Are you guys familiar with Creative Market? It's a wonderful website where you can go purchase things like brush packs, textures, illustrations, people have their own small shops on here. So these are all handmade textures you can make your own and there some resources online to show you how to do that but if that's not your thing and you just want a quick way to have some really high quality brushes or vector textures, then Creative Market is always my go to place to get those. So what I'm gonna be using today is these RVC Vector Brushpack Bundle. You can find it on Creative Market, it's $10 and it's by Ryan Clark...

. Just wanted to show that and I'll show you how to install those just shortly. And then the Vexture Kit is another one that I use. It's great. It's also on Creative Market and it is by Gerren Lamson. So you can just see I'll open these up for you shortly but they are little bits of Vexture textures that you can layer over your illustrations to kinda give them that vintage feel or a more rough feel. Take away a little bit of the harsh Illustrator look that they have. So those two you can find on Creative Market. So I have both of those already downloaded, I'm gonna pull them up for you right here in Dropbox. Okay so I have, the Brushpack Bundle and the Vexture Kit down here. When you download it, you'll be able to look at it just like this in your Finder or your folder. Now we have to get these into Illustrator. So to do that, I'm gonna open up a new Finder window and you just right click on Finder and select New Finder Window. What we have to do is find Illustrator. I am working in Adobe Illustrator CS6, so I double click on that and I believe it is under Presets, en_US and you're gonna open up the brushes folder. Then all you have to do is drag and drop these inside. I'm gonna create a new folder just to make it easy for us to find it once we're in Illustrator. So I'm just gonna select New Folder, I'm gonna do CreativeLive and open up that folder and drag and drop all of these into here. Okay, so they are in Illustrator now. I will go show you how to find them. To get your brushes, first thing you need to do is head up to View and... I'm sorry Window and make sure that there's a check mark beside Brushes, so that opens up the Brushes panel. To install a new Brush or to find the Brushes that you just installed, you come to the flyout menu, Open Brush Library, scroll down to CreativeLive, that's the folder that I just created and all of our brushes and texture kits are here now. So let's see, I will open this one. I'm just gonna open all these really quick here and the second one. Okay. Okay, that's all I need open for that and then let me make sure that we need these textures. Go back to CreativeLive and the Vexture Kit. Yes, okay. So, have you guys ever used Brushes before? Yeah a little bit, so let's talk about how these work. I don't need my Brushes panel open anymore so I'm just gonna bring over this panel that has the Brushes in it that we just used and this is one time I really like to use the Pencil tool. So if I come down here and draw a line with my Pencil tool, give it a Stroke. I can click through these Brushes and see what they're gonna look like. Okay and so in a second we're gonna be using these on top of our illustrations to add dimension and texture. A couple more over here. So, I believe too if you can change the color of these, just like you would a regular Stroke. Okay and the other thing is that I want to show you are the textures and I actually need to find those again, hold on. We'll go to brushes and textures. So these texture kits, I shouldn't have installed those, you only install your Brushes into the en_US. The Vexture Kits are Illustrator files in themselves. So all you have to do is open them in Adobe Illustrator so I am going to open them with CS6. Just click YES if you get anything like this. Okay so this is what these textures look like. You can kind of understand how they got to this because they probably scanned in some kind of a texture and so they are just bits of vector texture. So in order to start layering these I'm gonna grab some of the artwork that we made earlier today. I think this paintbrush and paint tube. I'm just gonna select those, copy them and come over and paste them to the document that we're working on now. So I wonna add some texture to this paint tube. So I'm gonna come in with the Pencil tool, the keyboard shortcut for that is N and to start kind of layering something right here and I'm gonna take the Stroke away and just have a Fill. Let's see. Okay I'll add that back. So I think, let's do a Stroke of orange for this and I just wanna make sure that it's on top. Yeah, that's perfect. So only look at the texture that's on top of the illustration. It's not gonna be a problem to get rid of anything that's flowing over the edges and I'm just gonna run through some of my options here. Like some of these look like paint splatters, which is kind of cute. This one, I don't know what that looks like and then if I come back over here, I'm thinking that one is pretty cute for this application and then this could be kinda neat. One easy way to change kinda the density of your Brushes is just to change the weight of it, you can change your way right over here under the Stroke panel. So if you increase the weight these guys are gonna get big and if you decrease the weight you can manually type in something under one point. So if I typed in like 0.2, it's gonna be really really small or maybe 0.5, it's gonna be a little bigger but I think I like where we're going with just one. Okay, so I wanna add this kind of orange texture just to the side of the bottle. So from here, what I'm gonna do is expand this so that it's no longer an editable line. I just want that artwork to be expanded and available to me to edit independently. So I have it selected, just gonna go up to Object and Expand. So now have all these things expanded and you can see kinda how this Brush was created was in tiles. I don't need this tile right here, it's no Stroke and no Fill so I just wanna get rid of it and so to do that, I select one, come up to Select, Same and Fill Color and I'll just hit the Backspace key. So now these are all grouped together, I'm gonna ungroup them and they are also grouped in tiles, so I'm gonna ungroup those, but if its too dense down here, so I can just delete that whole square. I think I need that one but maybe this square I don't really need, okay. And I'll bring this one up here. So we kinda have like a double line down here but I'll just bring it down. So I think as far as the texture on top of the bottle, I think that looks pretty good. There's a couple of options on how to get rid of these over here. The first thing I'm gonna do is just with my Direct Selection Tool, I'm just gonna kinda roughly gauge all the ones I don't need and delete them that way. And then next I'm going to create a clipping mask from this body of the bottle to enclose this texture. So I first need to ungroup all that and I could make a copy of this, that's Command + C, Command + F, right click, Arrange and Bring it to the Front. I need to group all of these little orange bits together. So I'm gonna select everything and then holding the Shift key down, I can deselect all the other elements and hit Command + G to group those. So with my top shape selected and the texture beneath it, I can create a clipping mask by hitting Command + seven and this is still all available to me, I can come in and maybe change the rotation of that a little bit. I think that looks a little more natural maybe but when I am happy with that, I am going to use the Pathfinder Trim tool to make these all individual objects that perfectly aligned to the edge. Okay. I think I can also add maybe some splatters out here and I'm gonna just take the Pencil tool which is keyboard shortcut N and maybe add like that definitely looks like paint, don't you think? Something like that just to play with a little bit. I like that. So that's too many splatters. So I'm gonna do the same thing Object, Expand it. You can see how they created this one s\o it's in tiles that randomly rotate. I'm gonna select just the no Stroke and no Fill, come up to Select and select the same Fill Color and delete all those bits. So now I have this, it's all grouped together. So I'm going to ungroup it and I can just kinda come in and start deleting things that we don't really want. I still think that's too many. So I can also just grab the eraser tool, that's Shift + E and increase the size by hitting the right Bracket tool and just kind of select which ones I wanna delete from this. Just to make it like a little more sporadic looking and with my Direct Selection tool I can grab like just this big guy and decrease its size a little bit. Maybe bring it over here. I kinda like that. So I'm gonna group all that together and I believe already group this together, no, so I need to group all that together. So that's a really fun way to use Brushes. You can just have fun all day with that and let me show you this too. I'm gonna show you a little bit about this when I use the textures but if you want this to be more subtle, so if I want all these orange bits to just be really subtle on this brown background, you can select this top background, okay and that brings it up over here in your color toolbar. Just double click on that and start playing with the color just a little bit. So if I wanted it just a little darker, I'm just gonna bring it down just a tad and select OK. Let me undo that and what I, okay what I wanna do is not change its color but I just want to save a new color. So this color is also right here and so I want to double click on it right here and I think this is gonna do what I wanted to do. So just deepen the color just a little bit and hit OK and now this colors here, I didn't have this selected, so it didn't change the color of the tube itself. So this color is ever so slightly deeper. To save a custom color like that into your Swatches panel, all you have to do is grab the color and drag and drop it right down to your Swatches panel. Okay so now I can, bring my edges back ungroup this and select these orange bits and then select the color that I just had. So that's just like a really subtle texture. It's currently selected, I'm just hiding my edges. So now if I double click on this, color in my Color panel, I can play with maybe lightening it up a little bit if I select OK it does automatically change, maybe a little lighter, Something like that. But that is a nice way to just add a really subtle texture. I Kinda like the bold orange though. Can you play with the opacity with that too? You can absolutely play with the opacity. I have it selected and I'm just gonna hide my edges. So, if I take it down to 50%, it's less. Yeah. The only thing you have to be careful about is, when using Opacity is your end product. So if you're working with Pantone colors, you always want your Pantone colors to be at 100% but if you are printing this for personal reasons or you're using your own printer, you can absolutely work with the opacity and that's a great way to make it subtle change as well.