Tutorial: make texture without leaving Illustrator

You can take any photo, or a scan of some scribbles, or other photographic source, and Live Trace it to make vector texture. But here’s a way to create textures with no outside source required.

Step 1: Draw a rectangle. Fill it with any color, and a stroke of None.

Step 2: Go to Effect>Texture>Grain. A humongus texture gallery will appear, and you can play with any of the textures and settings. Here, I used vertical grain:

Step 3: Select your freshly-textured rectangle and go to Object>Expand Appearance. You can rasterize the object instead, but I get better results expanding.

Step 4: Go to Object>Live Trace>Tracing options … Choose Black & White. Play around with the Threshold settings, Path Fitting and Corner Angle to get the right amount of texture. I’ve checked “Ignore White” so that I’ll end up with only the black, but you could also use the white for a similar, but lighter texture.

Step 5: Click Expand to expand the trace. Now you can place it over another object, or use the Pathfinder tools to cut it out of a shape. Here, I’ve changed the texture object to white, then placed it over the t-shirt with Overlay blending mode (t-shirt by rodrigofoca at iStockphoto.

EXTRA: You can also use this method to create texture brushes. Here, I start with a narrow rectangle, and drag the expanded trace into the Brushes panel. The possibilities are truly endless, and you never have to leave the comfy confines of your favorite vector drawing program!