15 Free Grunge Textures

Free grunge texture pack

Texture masking is a great way to add character and distinctiveness to your design work, but if you’re anything like me, you probably just manually create textures for each individual project instead of putting together an inventory to draw from when needed. This is an incredible time drain, and I decided it’s about time I put a stop to it.

Grunge Textures

For this post I’ve included a zip folder with 15 different grunge style textures that I created using creative commons images found on the internet, free of charge. Simply download and enjoy. These textures are a great way to add a gritty, industrial, or even vintage appeal to your design work. The designs I’ve compiled are as follows…

All of the different textures

Having this folder handy will save you the hassle of having to create a new texture every time you look to use one, and the variety of styles should keep you from getting bored with it for a while.

How To Use with Inkscape

Masking textures with Inkscape

Fortunately, Inkscape makes it very easy to mask textures over an object. Simply place the texture on top of the object you’d like to apply it to, select both objects, then go to Object -> Mask -> Set. If the texture is in true black and white (like all of the textures in this bundle are,) Inkscape will create negative space in your object where the black areas are.

Here’s an example of one of the textures. Notice how it’s all black and white…

Black and white

And here’s how it looks once I mask it over my emblem logo…

Texture applied to logo

The masking function within Inkscape removed the portions of the emblem where the black portions of the texture image placed on top of it were.

Video Tutorial

To further demonstrate, here’s a tutorial I made in the past where I used texture masking in Inkscape. Skip to the 16:35 mark for the masking part of the tutorial.

Free Download

All 15 textures can be downloaded at this link. This is a free resource — no money, no mailing lists, no survey, no other catch. Simply download and enjoy!

Become A Master of Inkscape!

Want to learn more about how Inkscape works? Check out the Inkscape Master Class – a comprehensive series of over 50 videos where I go over every tool, feature and function in Inkscape and explain what it is, how it works, and why it’s useful.

This post may contain affiliate links. Read affiliate disclosure here.

Logos By Nick

LogosByNick.com is an educational media platform for learning about graphic design software.

83 thoughts on “15 Free Grunge Textures

  1. Thanks for awesome textures. Since you do not mention any particular license, are there any uses that you do not agree with? Such as commercial uses or uses in the way that some might considered offensive (this is actually important to know if one likes both dark humor and memes).

  2. This is awesome and I got exactly the look I wanted in Inkscape but the t-shirt printer I need to send it to wants the file in eps, ai, or pdf and when I save to these formats the effect is just not the same. Any recommendations?

    1. Masking these textures won’t work in those formats. You’ll have to make a vectorized texture and apply it to the design through path operations.

  3. You are awesome! Thank you very much! I watched your video on how to ‘distress’ logos for Affinity and WOW! Your tutorial was simple, to the point and very informative! Thank you for taking the time to make this tutorial for novices like me and for the free grunge textures!

  4. I really appreciate your tutorials on You Tube and am working through your Master Class. When I used the Mask on one of my images, It worked, but the image was really washed out and had lost the bright colors that I was intending to keep. Any fix for this or is that one of the unintended side effects of masking?

  5. Thanks a ton for these (and for making them so easy to download without hassles of any kind). In addition to their usefulness in Inkscape, these are also great for GIMP and Blender as well as others I’m sure. Love your website and video channels, BTW, so thanks for those as well. 🙂

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