Inspirations & Aspirations

Lori Branding: texture process

I thought it would be nice to share some of the technique I used behind the branding I recently did for my bracelets. This is a quick look at how I got the paint texture for the lettering.

The first step is to have a vector of your lettering, and I prefer to have mine set up as a compound path.

Next, this gets printed as a 5% black outline on paper of your choice. Sometimes I use a watercolor paper or heavy construction depending upon what kind of texture I am going for. In this case I used a smooth card stock.

Next, you need to paint the lettering. I use black acrylic for most of my projects, but you can use just about whatever you want. A lot of people use watercolors. I like acrylic because I can get a full black which is important for changing the color. Some folks also use blue. Make sure you paint outside the lines. Ignore your inner childhood because you will need the paint to bleed past your line work.

Scan the painted piece in after it dries. I scan a pretty high resolution so I don’t have to potentially do it again down the road (800 dpi or more). Bring this into Photoshop and adjust the levels according to what you want. Overlay your solid vector (step one, which you can import from Illustrator or directly copy & paste) on the paint making sure all the lines are within the painted area. Control click the vector layer to get your selection, highlight your paint layer and do a ‘layer via copy’ (command J)

The next step is converting the color, which there are numerous ways of doing this but here I did a gradient map with Warm Gray 11c for the black and just leave the white transparent. And that’s it. For the last image I added the wood grain in back and a simple ‘Multiply’ layer property for the paint.