Week 8: Creating textured letterforms in Illustrator

Creating textured letterforms

In this lesson we overlaid textures from images we took on to drawings of letters

Here is the scan of my alphabet drawn from text all over worcester

Taken into photoshop and adjusted the contrast

After selecting and cropping an individual letter I used the threshold tool to make sure it was only black and white

Here i'm adding the threshold to make sure that the image is only black and white

Done, not much difference

This is one of the textures I plan to overlay, it's actually a spiky hedgehog in a bucket 

Im going to apply a grayscale filter to the image 

Nice and monotone

Created a new document in illustrator

Placing the font on illustrator, its different to pasting the original imaging, as placing it allows us to keep the size of that image small and adjusting it doesn't lose resolution

I've opened up image trace on the font after placing it on the correct layers

Placing the texture on the mid layer whilst creating a compound path

Once it's finished it gives the font almost a spooky, ghost like appearance.

Another example

A clearer viewing of the texture on this one

The texture is much harder to see depending on the colour you use it with

Creating a good contrast of colours gives a variety of different effects

A darker version of the last image

Conclusion: This process was actually very difficult to utilise effectively, it seemed to take an excessively long series of tasks to perform something that could have been done much easier on photoshop. However the results were interesting and there are some clear advantages to doing this process on illustrator over photoshop; such as the vast amount of features to use on image trace and the detail of editing the font on a more intricate level.