How to Distress Paper in Illustrator

Crumpled paper forms the basis of this Illustrator technique.

A distressed paper effect makes a piece of artwork look antique or a little bit more "urban." While the usual graphics program to do this in is Photoshop, Illustrator can also perform this technique. Illustrator versions of the distressed paper effect have the advantage of being resolution independent, though they take more work to set up the first time.

Things You'll Need

• Black and white digital photograph of distressed paper
• Adobe Illustrator CS 2 or higher

Instructions

1. Launch Adobe Illustrator, and press "Ctrl-D" to place an image; you'll navigate to the image of the distressed or crumpled paper you had earlier.

2. Convert the photograph to vector elements by clicking on the "Object" menu, then selecting "Live Trace" and then selecting "Make." This will start the Live Trace options in Illustrator, and will break up the artwork into a series of vector-drawn objects bounded by where the color changes. While there are several options to choose from, if your starting image is black and white, using the black and white default settings will work just fine. You'll see that everything turns into a set of Illustrator objects, all of them selected.

3. Delete the white objects from the converted photograph. You can do this manually, or more quickly by clicking on the "Select" menu, choosing "Same" from the menu that comes down, and selecting "Fill Color" on the final menu and clicking a white region. This will remove large swathes of the texture you created from the photograph.

4. Name the layer with the texture on it "Texture." Then lock it by clicking on the "Locked" space on the Layers palette.

5. Next, create a new layer and put it underneath the texture you just created. Fill the layer with the color you want your distressed paper to be; this will usually be around CMYK values of 12/20/10/10 or so.

6. Click on the "Gradients" palette, and set the type of gradient to "radial", then set the darker color on the gradient to the color you selected in Step 5. Adjust the sliders until you're getting the right amount of darkening at the edge of the fill area.

References

• Adobe: Tracing Artwork with Live Trace
• Adobe: Gradient Panel Overview