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The Grunge/scratchy effect has grown more and more popular for t-shirt designs and I thought I would share one way of how I’ve recreated this design in Adobe Illustrator CS. Our Goal is to go from this plain looking piece of text to a stylish grunge design.

1. Start out with one or two distress patterns. These will be used to create the grunge scratchy effect overlay on your text. These particular patterns I used can be found free at U.S. Screen Print and Inkjet Technology, thanks to Scott Fresener.

2. Write out some text. For this tutorial, I’ll be using the word Ireland but can you write whatever you so please. Outline Text. Type> Create Outlines

3. Apply a stroke weight to your text. I used 2 point and chose an artsy charcoal brush. I also used the same color as my future background for the stroke.

4. Object>Expand Appearance

5. Stroke>Fill Color> Round Edges, and increase stroke to two or three

6. Object>Path> Outline Stroke

7. Rotate your text, if you prefer. It makes for a cooler look!

8. Select one of your distress patterns and place it on top of text. Object> Arrange>Bring to Front and color if you like. I used a grey color.

9. Now Select your text edit>copy click off and paste> in front

10. Object> Compound Path> Make ( with the top layer of text) . Select Pattern while leaving the text selected ( use ALT). Object> Make Clipping Mask. Looking nice, huh?

11. Bring second pattern over on top of text. Make pattern same color as the background ( choose white like I did if you are designing for a t-shirt or some other type of merchandise… and save as a a transparent image) Tweak if necessary to any color of your liking.

12. Admire a job well done and begin to make wonderfully great art with this simple but stylish look.

If you have any questions or comments, leave a message below or contact me using my contact form located on my site.

Here are a few products that I created with this style:

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