Old Skull and Calfskin Vellum
There was a very lovely day last week, mid-seventies and breezy, I sat at my computer all day playing with creating different textures in Photoshop. I know, you usually think of Photoshop for editing and manipulating images from a camera. I like the filter tools and brushes for creating no scalable textures and backgrounds. I could use Illustrator, but I find too many filters and objects muck up the works.
One of the backgrounds I came up with was a very nice vellum parchment texture. (No, not the stuff used to line cookie sheets, old animal skin vellum like the Declaration of Independence was written on.) Supple tans and browns with all the irregularities of a hand-worked natural item.
Those are cool. I thought they were maybe somewhat plain, so I found an old medical illustration of a skull at various angles and ran a portion of it through some filters so I could vectorize it with autotrace in Illustrator. Then I decided I liked the skull and decided to put it on t-shirts and some of the other merchandise that doesn’t work with backgrounds.
