Add texture to your artwork

Transform your design with three different texturing techniques to create a vintage printed effect.

Published December 18, 2025

00:01

Introduction

Take your design from flat to fab by adding texture in Adobe Illustrator.

I'm Andrew Hochradel, and in the next few minutes I'm going to show you how to add incredible textures to your designs in Adobe Illustrator.

00:11

Understanding additive and subtractive texture

There are two different ways to add texture in Adobe Illustrator, additive and subtractive.

Here we have two different textures on either side of our art.

On the right we have a raster texture, which means it's based off pixels, and on the left is vector, which means that it is based off of paths.

00:28

Adding additive texture with raster blending modes

We are going to click and drag with our raster texture here.

We can change the blending mode to Multiply or even something like Color Burn to add a very simple additive of texture, you can see that the texture is added on top of our existing artwork.

Now with that texture selected, we are going to go to Object Lock, Selection to make sure that we can continue to work with the vector art that is underneath.

00:54

Creating subtle vector texture with roughen effect

Now with additive texture, we also can change the existing vector art without adding something on top.

So let's zoom in so we can see some of the detail.

From here we're going to select our art and go to Effect, Distort & Transform and Roughen...

This will create something really crazy, but if you take your settings down to something a little bit smaller, like 1%, you'll see that it's adding just a little bit of extra texture.

We want to change this to Smooth and then take this down even more to maybe 0.2%, very, very subtle to add that nice, inked edge.

We can hit OK.

And as you zoom out, we'll see that we now have a nice subtle texture on our art.

Now for subtractive texture, we can grab our vector

01:40

Applying subtractive texture using pathfinder

and align it to the artboard using the Align Tool.

Click to Horizontally align.

From here we are going to select our vector texture as well as the art that is vector underneath.

With both of those selected, we are going to go to Window, Pathfinder and then click on Minus Front.

This is subtractive texture.

And it also tracked all of that individual texture that is vector from our art.

So that you now have a very subtle texture that you can see through your vector art.

Now if we zoom out, you'll see we have subtle texture added,

02:20

Combining textures for finished artwork

we have vector texture removed and a little bit of raster texture added as well for some incredible final art.

Now it's your turn to fire up Adobe Illustrator, grab your textures and see what you can create.

What you'll learn

Add texture

Layer a raster image and use blending modes to apply an overall texture to your art.

Roughen your art

For a subtle inky look, experiment with the Roughen effect for a vintage vibe.

Subtract vector textures

Combine vector textures with the Pathfinder tool to remove unwanted areas and create unique effects.

Instruction by: Andrew Hochradel
Design by: Andrew Hochradel

Try these tutorials with Illustrator

Create illustrations and other graphics with vectors.

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