Australian graphic designer Andrew Fairclough knows exactly what it takes to craft digital design assets that enable graphic designers to blend realistic textures into their work. Owner of Kindred Studio and based in Los Angeles, Andrew founded True Grit Texture Supply back in 2015, establishing it as a design resource that offers “the best digital texturing tools money can buy.”
True Grit Texture Supply provides a variety of handmade texturing assets and brushes that make it easy to add halftone textures, distressing, and grain to design projects with a few clicks of a mouse. Andrew has spent more than 15 years and thousands of hours experimenting with real-world source materials, perfecting not only the textures he uses in his own workflow but those he makes available on the retail market.
Over the years, Andrew has found that many of the people who use True Grit Texture Supply’s products around the world are actually makers in their own rights, including comic illustrators, indie game designers, clothing designers, and even those working in the music and film industries.
Crafting most of his textures in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, Andrew pays meticulous attention to detail. His process begins with using real objects (like photocopiers, wood, or even folded paper) which are then scanned, converted to digital textures, and finalized for application.
To this day, True Grit Texture Supply has earned a reputation for being one of the best resources for realistic digital textures with a retro aesthetic.
One of our favorite products is Grain Shader Brushes for Photoshop, a diverse collection of authentic textures that make it easy to add everything from bold and grungy shading or drop shadows to subtle speckle accents and fine grain overlays.
Grain Shader Brushes for Photoshop was built using real source materials that include sponged paint, ink sprays, toner, concrete, and vintage paper samples that were expertly digitized and turned into a complete toolbox for creating rich and eye-catching textures.
The brushes in this collection are beautifully suited to everything from comic book artwork to vintage-style advertisements, logos, product packaging, merchandise, marketing materials, fabric and apparel designs, website backgrounds and decorative elements, social media imagery, book covers, album artwork, and even striking text effects.
Grain Shader Brushes for Photoshop provides a total of 39 unique brushes, inducing 13 fixed stroke-width brushes, 13 variable stroke-width brushes, and five grain-builder brushes that enable designers to create customized subtle grain overlays. This toolkit also includes 7 pressure-sensitive shader brush tool presets and 10 grainy overlay textures in super high resolution (14,000 x 19,000 px) in .png and .tiff formats.
The brushes in the Grain Shader collection leave no obvious repetition, ghosting, or cloning, so you can create seamless and natural textured shading effects with little fuss.
This product is suited for intermediate to expert Photoshop users, however, it includes a detailed user guide with easy-to-follow instructions and a brush thumbnail cheat sheet.
True Grit Texture Supply recommends using Adobe Photoshop CS6 or higher. A graphics tablet is required for pressure sensitivity. Grain Shader Brushes for Photoshop will perform best on a machine with a 2.4ghz processor or higher with 8gb of RAM, although 16+ is recommended.
Don’t have Photoshop? No problem! Grain Shader Brushes are available for Adobe Illustrator and Procreate!
True Grit Texture Supply currently offers 26 products through YouWorkForThem, providing a variety of tools that will add authentic texture to any design project. Visit their portfolio to take a look at the rest of their products and if you love what you find there, bookmark it so you can check back for new releases as time goes on!
