: Recreate rough, handmade style strokes to vectorized lettering I am currently working on a logo. I draw it by hand with a brushpen and really liked the rough edges, ink density variation and

@Samaraweera207

Well, if I wanted the best of both worlds, vector and raster, I'd use both Illustrator and Photoshop.

First to roughen your outlines in Illustrator. Select your text, and in the appearance panel, click the FX button and click Distort and Transform > Roughen.



The idea here is to roughen the outlines just a touch to make them uneven like this:



Then save your AI document. Next Open up Photoshop, and click File > Place Linked - and choose the Illustrator AI file you made. This will create a Smart Object in Photoshop, which can be edited or rescaled whenever you want - thus retaining the advantage of vectors.

In Photoshop, hit the Layer Effects "FX" icon. Go through the following settings and apply them all as close as you can.


First make sure the Blending Options are set to screen.





Next, add Bevel and Emboss





Then Contour





Texture - choose the "Grey Granite" texture in the dropdown





Satin





Colour Overlay




Here's the result



The beauty of this is that the original artwork is still editable. If you want to change the vectors, double click the Smart Object in the layers panel and it will open in Illustrator. You can edit the roughen effect there, since it's non-destructive.

If you want to rescale the image in Photoshop, simply hit CTRL+T - and resize it, and because it's vector, it won't degrade.

If you want to save some time, I've saved the Style preset for Photoshop here: www.filedropper.com/goldtexturepaint - be quick if you want it, don't know how long the file will stay up.

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@Margaret771

Scan a real stroke that you consider good for your text. Clean the scanning result in Photoshop. I have done it for your example stroke. There was much noise on the white. I selected the solid looking part by The quick selection tool and pasted it into a new layer. There I shortened the nearly constant solid black part only to have a shorter sample.

Paste your cleaned stroke image to Illustrator and Live trace + Expand it. You can search proper live trace options by checking the preview on.

I selected BW scan, 6 colors, min area = 5pix, fit to path accuracy = 2 pix, ignore white

Here's the live trace result:



The traced stroke shape was moved into Brushs panel. 2 different art brushes was created. One that scales the width if the whole shape do not fit to length and the other that do not scale the width, but compresses the length.

A few J's was drawed by free hand. Note, how the drawing direction affects.

Note: A text with the new stroke can't be scaled before expanding the shape.

For a plausible result you should carefully think, where a new stroke should start from and what's the direction. You should have prepared the brushes for different lengths.

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