9 Free Wood Textures for Vector Design

• July 28, 2018
• Nick Saporito
• 10 comments

If you’re looking to add character to your vector design work, texture masking is a great way to do so. In a previous post I shared a pack of free grunge textures and it was very well received, so today I’m going to be providing a bundle of 9 free wood textures for vector design work. You’ll be able to use these in both Illustrator and Inkscape.

Free Wood Textures

At the bottom of this post you’ll see a download link for a zip folder containing all 9 high resolution wood textures. I created all of these using creative commons images I found on the internet. Here’s an overview of the included designs…

If you weren’t already aware, he’s an example of the kind of effect you can achieve when masking your vector design work…

As you can see in the above image, applying the texture subtracts the dark area of the texture from your vector object, making those areas transparent. The white area of the texture will have no effect on the vector object (which is why these are all stripped down to black and white.)

Gray areas will create partial transparency, which will vary depending on how close to black or white the shade is.

Texture Masking with Inkscape

Applying the free wood textures with Inkscape is quite easy. Simply place the texture over your object (not under it,) then select both the texture and the object and go to Object > Mask > Set.

Make sure you have both objects selected before applying this

If later on you don’t like how it looks, you can undo it by going to Object > Mask > Release.

Texture Masking with Adobe Illustrator

Applying the free wood textures to your vector objects in Illustrator is slightly more complicated. Here’s a video explaining how it can be done. Start at the 10:49 minute mark.

Wood Textures Free Download

The wood texture bundle can be downloaded at this link: free-wood-texture.zip

If you have any questions, comments or concerns, leave them in the comments below. Enjoy!

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