W-News

How to Prepare Distressed Artwork

A common request from screen-printing customers is to make their garment logo look beaten up, aged or worn out. This makes it look like their favorite shirt – that comfortable tee, worn dozens of time and washed so much that the print starts to fade, crack or erode in brightness and density. Distressed prints simply look more relaxed, and customers have gravitated toward this trendy artwork style for years.

Fortunately for Screen printer, the distressed effect is relatively simple to create, edit and print. An overlay can be created for the worn-out look, and it can be quickly added or removed in art approvals for clients.

But since this effect is easy to do, it’s often created in such a rush that it can cause multiple problems for Screen printer during production. The distress overlay can damage the image in areas where it isn’t expected, making the type hard to read or causing an underbase print to stand out starkly from overprint colors. The best way to manage these issues is to address each one during a quality control check for each design that has a distress filter applied to it.

There are three processes for creating a distressed effect. Let’s look at each one.

1. Texture Pad printer 
The rapid explosion of available photos – either online or from a simple cellphone picture – makes texture photos a quick and easy option. If you don’t already have rights-free texture photos, you can find many sources online. CreativeCommons.org is one example. You can also buy photos from istockphoto.com. Be extra careful, however, that photos are used correctly; distorting, cutting or using photos in certain manners could potentially violate copyrights.

If you want to be extra safe, or create something completely custom, you can quickly shoot a texture photo. For an example, a cellphone photo of a wooden door texture can be used to create a distress layer (Figure 1).

The photo should be imported into CorelDRAW. Next, convert it to grayscale and adjust to high contrast using the curves menu. The resulting black-and-white texture is then converted to a monochrome bitmap, the background is filled as clear and the foreground is changed to match the background color. This creates a fast, organic distress overlay that has a grain similar to the deepest shadows in the original texture photo.

2. Scanned Pad printer
Using a direct scan from a scanner will often yield a cleaner texture with less fuzzy edges or lighting issues. The following is one way to create a good source: Take a heavy sheet of white watercolor paper and paint a large square with black acrylic paint. After it dries completely, roll the paper tightly both outside and inside on the long edge to create some cracking and distress to the painted layer. Next, you can experiment with different tools to scratch off some of the paint. One of the popular ways is to take a wire brush (like one that you would use to clean a grill with) and scrape the surface with or at 45 degree angles to the grain. If you want an extreme distress, you can then crush up the paper repeatedly and grind it as well. Once you have the right amount of weathering to the surface, you can then flatten it out using a board with a couple of heavy weights sitting on top of it overnight, and the next day scan the result into your software (Figure 2).

In CorelDRAW, just follow the same pattern as with the texture photo, except you will want to invert the image to use the white of the paper as the distress overlay and make the black areas clear fills.

3. Vector File
Many artists tend to frown on manually created distress overlays – probably because they can tend to look synthetic or fake if they are not practiced and carefully done. The truth is, creating a vector distress has multiple advantages over organic textures, and it is definitely a process that every artist should be prepared to use for the right design. The biggest advantage is that you can control exactly where and how much distress you place onto your graphics. This maintains maximum legibility, and the visual impact remains unaffected.

To create a distress layer as a vector image (which is a graphic layer that is composed of pieces or objects in software like CorelDRAW or Illustrator, instead of a layer of pixels as in a photograph), you will need the right software and some knowledge of the basic tools so you can manipulate the distress pieces.