What’s up, screen printing monkeys? Today, I’m giving away a few more free distresses (aka, distress patterns) for all of you.

The file comes with 15 different distresses and includes bitmapped TIFFs, and PSDs. The TIFFs are great for putting into Illustrator, because you can change their color once in AI. The PSDs are great if you’re building your art in PS.

Here’s a breakdown of what’s in this package.

Tee Shirt Distress

The normal wear and tear shirts get over the years follows the pattern of the shirt’s fabric. This distress is a great way to simulate that.

Denim Pattern Distress

If we’re playing around with tee shirt distresses, why not throw in a denim pattern. Nothing goes together quite as well as jeans and a tee shirt.

Upholstery Distress

Found this gem of an image while researching for this post. Don’t know why I never thought of using an upholstery type of pattern as a distress before.

Denim Distress

Here’s another one made from a pic of jeans. I like how this one fades from bottom to top.

Metal Distress

Always a classic go-to, this brushed aluminum makes for a great distress pattern.

Stucco Distress

Another easily exploited texture in our immediate surroundings is stucco. Works great as a distress.

Fabric Distress

This fabric distress is interesting, especially with that seam in there.

Surface Distress

I pictured this working well on a heavy text because of the heavy distress up top leading to barely any down below.

Meat Distress?

I actually believe the original picture I made this distress from was a shot of a piece of meat!

Tree Distress

Though it’s fairly easy to tell this is from a tree now, it could work wonders on top of a well-balanced logo.

Paper Distress

Paper lends itself incredibly well to making distress patterns. Want to make one of your own from paper? Crumple up a piece, flatten it out, scan it into Photoshop and start playing around. It works like a charm.

Tree Bark Distress

This one was made from the bark of a tree. Great for the organic, outdoorsy fella.

Scratched MDF

This one comes from a scratched up piece of painted MDF. The scratches give that typical distress pattern look.

Textured Paper Distress

This one is actually from a piece of textured paper, believe it or not. Heavy on the distressing, it would work well over a picture of your mother-in-law’s face.

Urban Decay Distress Pattern

I believe this was a shattered window but the original also looks like it could be a really old sidewalk. Either way, it’s a win as a distress pattern.

Download Your Free Distress Patterns

Want to Make Your Own Distress Patterns?

Open up any image in Photoshop and change it to grayscale. Play around with levels and curves until you get only what you want. You can also do this with select color range.

Change the image mode to bitmap and select diffusion dithering. A diffusion dither lends itself perfectly to screen-printing.

Change the image mode back to grayscale. Cmd+click on the grayscale composite channel thumbnail to get a selection. Cmd+Shift+I to invert that selection. Make a new layer and fill it in whatever color you want.

Boom! Custom made distress patterns for you!

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