I watched an excellent illustration tutorial using Illustrator CC to add textures to vector art. I have CS4 so I was interested in seeing how much information translated over.
To test out what I could do with just a few of the techniques, I used an Illustration from Fiona WoodCock’s delightfully textural children’s book “Look” as my jumping off point.
Techniques I used from the video were:
- Scatterbrush creation (a tool I almost never use)
- Masking using the Transparency palette (again, an underutilized tool)
- Texturizer Effect (ditto)
Even though I really only used 1 brush (and whipped this out in less than an hour), I really like how this turned out as a proof of concept. Of course some of this could have been improved using scanned and masked textures, but I like the flexibility of using all vector texture options.
I think a good next step would be to figure out how to mimic illustrators who use analog textures and assemble a toolkit (mental and digital) of approaches to create the specific effects.
One thing I learned: this way of working eats up a ton of RAM.
Labsquad 
