Giving graphics a faux worn look is known as “distressing” the image. Some people like this type of design because it looks used and others don’t. But if you want to give your designs a distressed look how do you do it?

I use Paint Shop Pro for the vast majority of my designs, but these same techniques can be used with any major graphics editing and creation software. First create your image like this:

text before distressing

That’s the easy part.

Now, find an image, fill, pattern or other graphic that has some color variations and is somewhat random and cover the new layer with it using a tool like the “fill tool”. I picked a texture in Paint Shop Pro called “paper” for this example:

pattern used to generate distressed look

Now, warp the heck out of it and apply filters to make the pattern more random. I applied a “twirl” effect and also the mesh warp tool to get this:

pattern with warp effects applied

Then I used my “pick tool” with a tolerance of 1, clicked on a section of the screen and then the select similar with a tolerance of 2 to generate the pattern for my distressing. Deleting this selection it that leave something like this:

image used to denerate distressed look

Then deleting this same selection on the actual image leave this pattern:

distressed image

And there you have it. A simple “distressed” look for your products.

You can play around with different patterns to start with and generate an infinite number of distressing patterns so take your time until you find one you like.

—————————————————————–

J.J. Jackson is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. and Cafepress “Top Shopkeeper”. He has been selling t-shirts on-line since 2004 and is the owner of the T-Shirt Entrepreneur, a site dedicated to helping people get involved in the T-shirt Economy. He is also the owner of Funny When Wet T-shirts, American Infidel Tshirts as well as many other online t-shirt and gift stores.