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Letterpress effect illustrator5/18/2023 ![]() ![]() I chose a handmade looking paper with highly visible tooth to it, ‘Watercolor paper background texture’ (Image ID: 57042394) by Ambient ideas for the background and a second image that also has visible fibers, but is more flat, ‘Paper texture’ (Image ID: 59705827) by R-Studio.Ĥ. Import two different paper textures, one for the printed, compressed area, and another for the blank background. Lay out your artwork in Illustrator, then bring it into Photoshop and merge the design into one layer.ģ. One can also simply lighten the darkest colors up a bit, replacing blacks with dark grays, for instance.Ģ. For instance, I brought my blacks down to 80 or 90 percent opacity. TIP: To help the textures show through dark colors, make those colors slightly transparent. For shading, I used a ‘halftone pattern swatch’ (Image ID: 41049799) by williammpark. In this case, I extracted the palm trees and the wavy lines delineating the clouds. One great thing about these vector files is that they are relatively easy to slice and dice and adapt to your overall design’s needs as I have done with ‘Tropical coast’ (Image ID: 79855960) by song_mi. ![]() I combined all these in an Illustrator file, and then created a background using ‘seamless wave illustration’ (Image ID: 57481165) and ‘ocean wave seamless’(Image ID: 86052196) by paul_june. Inside these, I placed the reflections of a sailboat from ‘Silhouettes of yachts’ (Image ID: 29968414) by charobnica, and a stylized sun from Jeffrey Moore’s ‘Multiple stylized sun graphics’ (Image ID: 52298176). I started out with a pair of sunglasses, Terry Richardson ‘modern cats’ 5000 frame (Image ID: 55073296) by elenabo. Shutterstock has thousands of vector resources that are perfect for this. So letterpress tends to rely on line art, bold graphic elements, and limited color palettes. Bear in mind that during real-world letterpress printing, each color is applied separately, using a different plate, requiring the machine to be reset, making complex, multicolored designs hard to pull off. This tutorial requires both Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and you should have a mid- to advanced-level understanding of both programs to follow these steps.ġ. To demonstrate the process, we will make a simple, summer-themed postcard. Of course, Photoshop won’t actually crimp your paper, so true letterpress printing can only be achieved on a real printing press, but one advantage of faking it in Photoshop is you’re less likely to lose a finger. Printers attempted to avoid such errors by increasing the force of their machines so much so that the plates would actually compress and flatten the paper at the point of contact, creating the distinctive indentation and contouring for which letterpress is known today. One of the problems with the process stemmed from the fact that, for centuries, both printing plates and paper were handmade, and therefore not perfectly flat, resulting in knocked out areas where ink failed to deposit on the paper. In the broadest sense of the term, letterpress refers to the technique invented by Johannes Gutenburg whereby a raised surface is inked and pressed onto paper (relief printing). LETTERPRESS PRINTING shutterstock_7963231 Letterpress printing is one of the easiest printing techniques to simulate, and requires little more than making simple selections, deleting parts of images, and applying the most basic layer effects–which makes it perfect for a Summer side-project. The artifacts and imperfections associated with older, traditional techniques can evoke strong feelings of nostalgia in the viewer and lend a vintage feel to even the simplest of designs. Don’t be afraid to explicitly mimic the look and feel of low-tech printing methods. Taking a direct cue from the graphic arts of yesteryear can often work wonders. One of the perennial challenges for designers in the computer age is creating images that seem organic, that appear handmade, and feel analog even though they were digitally generated. ![]() Make your summer BBQ or pool party invite super-cool and give it a lo-fi twist with a vintage letterpress effect. ![]()
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