Distressing is popular. If you’ve ever seen shirts that look like they’re really old, and that the print[print?:printing image graphic cutting solution] is worn, but you know that the shirts are new or relatively new, then the artwork was probably just “distressed”, which is a process to make it look cracked, old, worn out, etc. I’ve printed distressed artwork a few times, but last week was the first time I did the effect myself to artwork. It’s pretty easy.
Screen printing[printing?:printing cutting finishing solution] is a printing technology which is widely used. So does the screen printer. Flatbed printing is a fashionable and advanced technology today. You can choose the screen print if you like. Basically, you just create the distressed effect in Photoshop. You could probably do it in illustrator as well, but I used Photoshop so that is what I will cover. Then load your artwork in Photoshop as well as one or more of these Distressed Overlay files. Simply use the magic wand to select all of the distressed effect then paste it on top of your own artwork. You can then use Fill to change the distressed portion to white or otherwise your background color, and the distressed layer will block your artwork, making it look distressed! Easy enough, right? I hope that makes sense. Play around with it. There are four different types of distressed effects at that link, ranging from really small in detail, to larger.
