Locked lesson.

Upgrade

About this lesson

We will get ready to add some finishing touches to the logo design starting with a texture that we will create from scratch using my own technique for making a distorted/grunge texture.

Quick reference

Making a Grunge Texture

We will get ready to add some finishing touches to the logo design starting with a texture that we will create from scratch using my own technique for making a distorted/grunge texture.

When to use

Anytime that you want to add a distressed or grungy feel to an illustration or logo these techniques for creating custom textures can be very useful. 

Instructions

  • Begin by opening the Making a Grunge Texture - Exercise.ai file
  • Start off by making a new layer at the top of the Layers Palette and locking all of the other layers below
  • Open the Brushes Panel and then click on the hamburger menu in the top right corner of the panel
  • From the dropdown menu that appears, go to Open Brush Library > Artistic > Artistic_ChalkCharcoalPencil
  • Select the fourth brush down which should be the Chalk-Scribble brush and click on it
  • Once you have clicked on the Chalk-Scribble brush here, it should be added to your main Brushes Panel
  • Next, open the Stroke Panel and change the line weight to 10 points
  • Press 'B' on the keyboard or select your Brush Tool from the toolbar on the left side of the interface
  • Begin scribbling to see your brush texture in action
  • The goal here is to fill out a large area about the size of your artboard and fill in any large empty spaces
  • Once you have created a large area with your Chalk-Scribble brush switch to your Selection Tool (V) and click and drag around the entire area to select it
  • After selecting all of your brush texture go to the Object Menu and choose 'Expand Appearance' from the dropdown
  • Go to the Pathfinder Tool and choose the Merge option to combine all of the expanded points into a solid shape
  • Switch to your Direct Selection Tool (A) and click anywhere inside of your merged brush texture
  • Go to the Select Menu and choose Same > Fill and Stroke and then hit the delete key on the keyboard
  • With your Direct Selection Tool (A) still selected, click and drag around the area where your texture was which should 'appear' to be empty and you will notice that there is still in fact quite a lot of empty shapes showing up
  • Double click on your fill color and fill it with a solid black, so that all of the remaining shapes are now filled in
  • Select your Type Tool (T) and create some text using a heavy or bold typeface
  • Scale the size of the text up so that it covers the texture area and make it solid white
  • Drag a copy of your text downwards while holding Alt/Option+Shift so that you now have two lines of text approximately the same width as your texture
  • Use your regular Selection Tool (V) to select both lines of text and drag them downwards again while holding Alt/Option+Shift to duplicate both lines
  • You should now have four lines of white text that cover the texture almost completely
  • Next, select all four lines and convert them into outlines by going to the Type Menu and choosing 'Create Outlines'
  • Select all four lines of outlined text while holding the Shift Key and group them by pressing Command/Ctrl+G
  • Send the text to the back by going to the Object Menu and choosing Arrange > Send to Back so that the texture is now in front of your four lines of white outlined text
  • Switch back to your regular Selection Tool (V) and click and drag around the text and the texture at the same time
  • Open the Pathfinder Tool and choose the Merge option once again
  • After merging your text and texture, press A to get your Direct Selection Tool and click on any part of the white text
  • Go back to the Select Menu and choose Same > Fill & Stroke before pressing the delete key to get rid of all of the white
  • Do the same for the black by selecting any part of it with your Direct Selection Tool and going to the Select Menu and choosing Same > Fill & Stroke and then deleting it
  • Now when you use your Direct Selection Tool to click and drag around the area you will notice that you have a lot of even smaller and finer shapes
  • With all of these points selected, press 'D' on the keyboard to fill it in with your default colors
  • Press Shift+X to swap the fill and stroke colors
  • Press the 'X' key to toggle between the fill and stroke
  • Choose none for the stroke color
  • You should now have a dusty/grungy texture that is filled with solid black
  • You can now use your Direct Selection Tool to select any larger areas of black that were left behind from the text and delete them to clean up the texture
  • After your texture has been cleaned up you should be left with a subtle grunge texture made up of small, random shapes
  • Click and drag around the entire texture and then press Command/Ctrl+G to group it together 

Hints & tips

  • Depending on the brushes you choose, you can create a wide variety of custom textures by following the same process outlined above.
  • Once you have a texture that you like you can duplicate it and overlap them to create more dense looking textures.
  • It can be helpful to begin building a separate document of textures that you can use in other projects.
Login to download
  • 00:05 At this point, our logo is pretty much assembled, and it's looking pretty good.
  • 00:08 So let's go ahead and bring up our layers for a second and
  • 00:12 just make sure that everything here is nice and cleaned up.
  • 00:14 We should have our expanded logo that we've now merged and expanded.
  • 00:19 And from here, what I want to think about doing is maybe adding some texture.
  • 00:23 Now I'm gonna show you guys a cool way to make kind of a grunge/dusty,
  • 00:28 scratchy looking texture from scratch just using some of the custom brushes here in
  • 00:32 Illustrator.
  • 00:33 In order to do that we actually wanna create a new layer.
  • 00:37 All right, so I'm just gonna add one here and lock those layers.
  • 00:42 And then I wanna grab my brushes over here on the side and
  • 00:45 click on this hamburger menu on the top right and come down to Open Brush Library.
  • 00:50 Now from here, we wanna choose our Chalk Charcoal Pencil brushes and
  • 00:54 we wanna look for a brush called Chalk Scribble,
  • 00:58 should be maybe the fourth one down here, all right?
  • 01:01 So once you have your chalk scribble brush, go ahead and close it and
  • 01:04 you'll see it over here in your Brushes pallet.
  • 01:06 Now we also want to come over to the stroke panel, and increase the stroke
  • 01:10 to maybe about 10 or so and then press B on the keyboard to get our brush.
  • 01:16 Now from this point, all we have to do is basically start scribbling And
  • 01:20 you can see that you get this kinda scribbly, grungy looking texture.
  • 01:24 So the goal here is to basically just kinda fill up a large area
  • 01:28 with this texture.
  • 01:29 So I'm just gonna take a couple of moments here to fill this in and
  • 01:32 just paint with this brush.
  • 01:34 And you wanna, as you're painting,
  • 01:36 you want to be aware of any kinda large, empty spaces, and try to fill those in so
  • 01:41 that you don't have any areas that are just too large and empty.
  • 01:47 Okay, so if you see in here I'm gonna fill that space in a little bit.
  • 01:51 So this space and that space and it's basically just kind of scribbled with this
  • 01:55 brush but it actually creates a pretty cool looking texture.
  • 01:59 Now from here, we've got to do a few more things in order to get a much
  • 02:04 simpler and kind of subtle looking texture that we want to go for.
  • 02:09 But this is how the process starts, this is how I like to do it.
  • 02:14 So I wanted to share this technique with you guys here because it seemed
  • 02:16 like a good point to start adding some texture to our logo.
  • 02:21 So once you've got a pretty large area filled in, go ahead and
  • 02:23 select the whole thing with your regular selection tool.
  • 02:26 Come up to the objects menu and choose expand appearance.
  • 02:29 Now just like before,
  • 02:30 this is gonna convert it in to this giant mess of shapes over here.
  • 02:34 But we're gonna bring up our path finder and then choose merge.
  • 02:38 So once this merges all of these shapes together,
  • 02:40 you just have to give it a couple of moments here.
  • 02:43 It is kind of a lot of shapes and points that it's trying to put together.
  • 02:46 It's going to simplify it and
  • 02:48 basically merge it just like we did with our logo in the previous lessons.
  • 02:52 The next thing I'm going to do is press A on the keyboard to get my direct
  • 02:55 selection tool.
  • 02:56 And click anywhere in this shape and make sure that you have that black or
  • 03:00 dark gray color selected.
  • 03:02 Now come up to the select menu and choose same fill and stroke.
  • 03:06 And now just hit delete on the keyboard.
  • 03:08 And while it looks like everything is gone, if you click and
  • 03:11 hold around it with the direct selection tool,
  • 03:13 you'll see that there's actually still quite a lot of information here.
  • 03:17 So what we're going to do is double click on the fill color and
  • 03:21 let's just go ahead and maybe fill it with solid black, all right?
  • 03:25 Or from here, we're gonna have to change this to solid black.
  • 03:29 So come up again, choose same fill and stroke color and double click.
  • 03:34 Now let's just come down here and make sure that it's set to black.
  • 03:38 And there you go.
  • 03:40 Okay, so we're getting there.
  • 03:41 There's actually one more step.
  • 03:43 But you see that now it's getting a little bit more interesting looking.
  • 03:47 Okay, so the next part that we have to do here is add some text.
  • 03:52 So for the text I wanna create, and
  • 03:55 you can really write anything that you want here, it doesn't really matter.
  • 03:58 Let's just go ahead and make it bigger.
  • 04:01 And we're gonna use a nice kind of bold font here.
  • 04:03 So I'm just going to choose,
  • 04:06 let's say maybe get my character panel and let's just go ahead and
  • 04:11 use a font like Gotham, something that's pretty bold, pretty heavy.
  • 04:16 This should do the trick.
  • 04:17 And let's make it white, so press D on the keyboard and then choose none for
  • 04:21 the stroke color, and then just drag it copy down holding Alt+Option+Shift,
  • 04:27 and type out a second word.
  • 04:28 I'm just gonna type out the word scribble here and make it a little bit smaller so
  • 04:31 that it fits within the area of my texture.
  • 04:36 Now, I'm gonna select both of these and drag and copy down so
  • 04:39 that it fills up either more space here, and
  • 04:42 now I can select all of this text and convert it to outlines.
  • 04:48 Create outlines, so from here I'm gonna select
  • 04:52 each of my outlined copies of the text and press Cmd+G to group them together.
  • 04:56 And we're going to send it to the back.
  • 04:58 So I'll go object, arrange, sent to back, so
  • 05:01 that your texture should now be in front of the text.
  • 05:05 So once again with my regular selection tool, I'm going to select everything,
  • 05:09 come back to my pathfinder once again, and choose merge.
  • 05:14 And it might take a few moments here, just like before to merge all of this together.
  • 05:18 But once you merge it, grab your direct selection tool, click on an area of white,
  • 05:24 come up to Select > Same Fill & Stroke, and then delete it, click on an area
  • 05:29 of black, and once again go Select > Same Fill & Stroke and delete it.
  • 05:34 And now a few direct selections will click and drag around everything, and
  • 05:38 you've got some even finer points.
  • 05:42 So now you can press D on the keyboard to get your default colors and
  • 05:45 then press Shift + X to swap your stroke and your fill.
  • 05:48 X to toggle between the two and then choose none for the stroke color and
  • 05:52 you've basically got all of these tiny dots and random scribbles.
  • 05:58 So what we need to do now is just with our direct selection tool, come in here and
  • 06:03 delete all of these large shapes that still look like letters or
  • 06:06 chunks of the letters that we merged.
  • 06:09 So I'm just gonna delete most of these big shapes in here.
  • 06:12 So that always should be left with our all of these tiny kind of dust
  • 06:17 looking speckles and scratches and all that good stuff.
  • 06:24 Basically something like this.
  • 06:26 All right, this is the subtle texture that we were looking for and
  • 06:29 we went through a couple of steps to create it.
  • 06:33 But once you've got all this in here, you can click and drag around it and
  • 06:37 then just press Cmd+G to group it together.
  • 06:41 Okay, so you've basically now got a nice looking kind of speckled dust scratchy
  • 06:47 texture that we've created from scratch just using one of the default brushes and
  • 06:51 Adobe illustrator

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.

Gift this course