In PART ONE of Easy Vector Textures, we covered a quick and easy way to create vector textures using the Live Trace Tool in Illustrator. Here in PART TWO, we are going to put some of those quick and easy textures to use as we create a simple Urban Grunge scene.

Before we can begin our urban scene, we’ll need to go grab some texture images to use. The images I will be using are shown below and include images of bricks, corrigated metal, some rusty drips and a few different grungy papers.

Open Illustrator and start with a rectangular artboard.

Let’s begin by creating a brick wall that will serve as our backdrop. Place the image of bricks onto the artboard (File > Place), select the image and make a Live Trace (Object > Live Trace > Make and Expand). Select the white portions (Select > Same > Fill Color) and fill with a reddish brick color, and fill the black portions with a much darker shade of that brick color. ( For more information on these steps, refer back to PART ONE.

Now let’s create some grungy pipes to run up the side of our wall. First, Place and Live Trace your rusty drips image, but this time open the Trace Options window (Object > Live Trace > Trace Options) and select the Grayscale mode. The Trace Options window is shown below. When you have the settings as you want them, hit the Trace burron. Select bits and pieces of your grayscale trace and delete, so that we will be able to see our pipe through the texture.

Once you have your rust drips texture to your liking, we’ll need to create our pipe. Make a long vertical rectangle and give it a gray/white gradient like below. Then place the texture on top of the rectangle, select both the shape and the texture, and Group them together (Object > Group).

Next, let’s use our corrugated metal photo to create the effect of some shadows thrown by buildings against our brick wall. Place and Live Trace the image, again using the Grayscale mode to give added depth. Hopefully, the trace of your image will provide a texture with notable hills and valleys, like the one I am using which can be seen below. Delete the lower portions of the texture and then select the upper most portion and fill it with white. I have filled it with black in the example below just so you can see the general shape we are going for.

We are now ready to begin compiling our urban scene. Position the brick textured object in the back center. Now take your grungy pipe and place it vertically on top of the brick wall to either side. You may want to duplicate your pipe, resize the duplicate to be noticeably thinner, and place it a few clicks over from the first pipe. Now take your shadow object (which in reality will be the negative space of our shadows) and place it along the top edge of the brick wall, making sure that your hills and valleys are pointing down. Select the shadow shadow shape and give it Transparency of 20%. Your scene should look something like this:

Our brick wall looks empty, so let’s make some signs/posters to slap on there like you would see in the city. Start by creating some distressed sheets of paper using the Pen Tool. Make sure to give them some bent corners and tears along the edges. Then put some writing/design on the papers – personal ads, music posters, event announcements, whatever.

Now we need to grunge up our posters, so grab some images of distressed or stained paper. Place and Live Trace the images, as we have done all the others. I am tracing these in Grayscale Mode, as well. Select the areas of the traces that you want to overlay onto your posters and delete the rest. Play with the transparency of the paper textures, so that we are still able to see the design behind, even if faintly.

Next, simply overlay your paper textures on top of your posters.

And place them on our wall.

Now let’s take one final step to really drive it home.  We are going use the brick texture we created at the very beginning, to bring the textured feeling and depth forward and pull things together.  First, select only the dark red portion of the brick texture, copy it (Edit > Copy) and paste it in front (Edit > Paste in Front).

Next, bring the pasted texture to the front (Object > Arrange > Bring to Front) and change the fill color to black.

Knock back the transparency of this new top object to 10%.

And there it is.  An Urban Grunge Scene – made quick and easy by creating our own vector textures using Illustrator’s Live Trace Tool.  

Incorporating textures into your vector artwork is a great way to add visual interest.  Manually drawing a detailed vector texture in Illustrator can be labor intensive and time consuming.  But creating custom dynamic textures using the Live Trace tool makes Illustrator textures quick and easy.In Part One of Easy Vector Textures, we’ll walk through the simple steps of creating a texture.  Part Two, will be an exercise in using some of textures in a design.Let’s start by selecting a photo that shows the type of texture you want to create.  I am going to use the weave texture shown below.Once you have selected a texture, place the photo into your Illustrator document (File > Place). With the photo selected, create an expanded trace of the image by selecting Live Trace in the Object menu (Object > Live Trace > Make and Expand), which can be seen on the left.  The trace will be a simplified black and white vector version of the texture image. In order to use the texture to modify a larger design, we want to separate out the black and get rid of the white – to leave negative space through which the objects behind the texture will show through. Select all of the white portions of the traced texture by, first clicking on a portion of the white using your Direct Selection Tool, and then choose Select Same > Fill Color for the Select menu. (For for information on using the Select Same option, see QUICK TIP – Easy Way to Select Multiple Objects.)With all of the white portions of the texture selected, hit Delete on your keyboard.Now you are left with only the black portions of the texture.To see how the texture can be used to modify a flat object, draw a rectangle and fill it with the color of your choice, as seem below.Now select your texture object, fill it with a slightly different shade of the chosen color, and place it on top of the rectangle. Now we have an object with a detailed texture – that only took us a matter of seconds!Here are a few more simple samples of quick and easy textures creating using the Live Trace Tool:

Many of the basic Illustrator tools have a palette of options allowing you to tweak a number of variables within the tool.  Using these settings gives you much greater control of the way objects and effects appear.

To pull up the tool options for a given tool simply select the tool and hit Return (Mac) or Enter (PC).

Example ~ the options for the Warp tool is shown below: