texture backgrounds

Urban Grunge Vector Textures

| quirkymundo

I love finding interesting textures in my surroundings, so I sometimes go hunting with my camera. In my town, I’ve found an abundance of grungy urban decay. Peeling paint, cracking walls, rusting metal, water and weather damage, pitted stone, lichen, gritty gravel and concrete – it’s amazing what’s out there if you look closely enough.

I made fifty urban grunge textures into black and white vector images traced from high-contrast photographs. These are for sale through my adobe stock portfolio.

The following thumbnails give an overview of the range of images I created.

Here are close-up detailed views of a selection of the textures.

The textures are perfect for simulating the effects of age, wear and decay in your photos and graphics.

They are also perfect for use as grungy abstract backgrounds in your graphic design projects such as stationery and flyers.

You could also add some hardcore grit and grunge to your text and images.

Save yourself hours of walking, photography and processing and let my textures bring the grungy urban world into your digital reality.

Powder Vector Textures

| quirkymundo

Can you guess what happens if you take a large sheet of paper, a packet of hot-pink Holi powder, a camera and a furry four-legged ‘supervisor’?

Things quickly get messy as I start chucking powder around, and fortunately, my cat loses interest.

But the mess is worth it as the results get interesting.

I gradually added powder, starting with a light sprinkle, and progressing to a heavy, textured layer of almost full paper coverage. I took photographs throughout the experiment and the end result is twenty-seven black and white powder vector textures which are for sale on Adobe Stock.

The following thumbnails show the full range of images.

Here are close-up detailed views of a selection of the textures.

The textures are great for adding irregular, organic texture effects to flat colour graphics and illustrations.

You could experiment with layering, changing blending modes or using colour and gradient fills to produce complex and colourful backgrounds.

Create eye-catching abstract backgrounds for use on product packaging.

I hope my few examples give you a taste of the creative possibilities offered by these unusual textures. They’re easy to use and ready to go, with no mess and zero powdery clean up required.

Scratch and Scrape Textures

| quirkymundo

In my ongoing hunt for unique texture possibilities, I decided to experiment with some scratchboard, or scraperboard as it’s known in the UK. It’s a heavy foil-coated cardboard with a scratchable matt-black top layer and is generally used to craft intricate and laborious metallic engravings.

Alternatively, you can drop it and scrape it (and your knees) around on the floor and up the walls, attack it with sandpaper and maybe even a fork. This enjoyably experimental destruction created an unusual variety of ‘scratch and scrape’ abstract textures.

I then digitised the boards to create a set of forty black and white ‘scratch & scrape’ vector textures. These are available to buy from Adobe Stock.

The following thumbnails show the full variety of textures.

The following are close-up details of a few of the images.

These textures are perfect for adding scratchy damage effects to your design or illustration.

They also make it easy to create strikingly grungy abstract backgrounds.

Create unusual and unique abstract images by combining, colourising, filling and blending.

I had a lot of fun creating this texture pack and the final results were definitely worth the effort.

Tasty Textures

| quirkymundo

As part of my stock selling mission I’ve decided to include textures in my portfolio. I have a long habit of scanning anything I think might make an interesting texture and then tinkering with it in Photoshop. This week I have mostly been making two-toned lino textures.

These are for sale on Shutterstock and the red one has already had some downloads which is an exciting start. More textures to come soon…

Coloured lino print background textures
Coloured Lino Print Background Textures