I’ve put more time into this new collection of texture resources than ever before, but I’m happy to give them away to my readers for free! I’ve been busy painting, scrunching and distressing pieces of fabric to produce a range of surface textures that mimic the appearance of old aged t-shirts with faded prints. These 9 digital textures help you to transform your clean artwork into retro style graphics with realistic distressing where the ink has flaked away from being washed and worn over many years.

9 Free "Washed & Worn" Aged T-shirt Textures

My free Washed & Worn aged t-shirt effect texture collection contains 9 images, each with a unique natural distressed appearance. At a huge 4500x3000px 300ppi resolution they can even be used to create realistic aged effects in your apparel design projects, where ‘Direct to Garment’ printing can replicate that same vintage aesthetic as your favourite old t-shirt, but with the texturing digitally applied straight to the artwork.

How to Use the Washed & Worn Textures

My preferred technique for using image textures is with the help of a Layer Mask in Adobe Photoshop. It non-destructively erases your artwork, so you can revert back or adjust the texture if you ever need to. Click the layer mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to add a mask to your artwork layer.

Choose one of the textures and open it in Photoshop. Select All (CMD+A) and Copy (CMD+C), then close the image to return back to your main document. Hold the ALT key and click on the layer mask thumbnail in the Layers panel to edit the mask contents directly. Paste (CMD+V) in the texture, then scale it to size and adjust its position.

Click on the layer thumbnail to exit out of the mask to see the texturing being applied to your artwork. You can adjust the strength of the effect by altering the Levels of the texture. Select the mask thumbnail in the Layers panel, then press CMD+L to open the Levels window. Adjust the shadows, midtones and highlights sliders to change the contrast of the texture.

Download my Free Washed & Worn T-Shirt Textures

Want more? Check out my Washed & Worn DELUXE textures pack

Based on my most popular download on Spoon Graphics—the original Washed & Worn textures pack—this new product is bigger and better with double the number of textures at twice the size, providing a much greater level of detail for adding realistic vintage T-Shirt effects to your designs. With 17 super-high-resolution JPG and PNG files, all with a unique texture, you can transform your clean designs into retro-style t-shirts with faded prints.

Washed and Worn Deluxe Vintage T-Shirt Textures

Get my Washed & Worn Deluxe Textures Pack

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48 Comments

  1. Chris – Question: Can you share why you chose Photoshop over Illustrator for this texture? Always looking to learn!

    • Vector textures have to be made of lots of tiny shapes, whereas raster textures are much more realistic with loads of variances in tone. Plus, they’re much less CPU intensive!

    • I think I learned this from Chris, but you can also use this textures in Illustrator. You can use raster images as opacity masks, no need to live trace these textures.

  2. Spoon, you rock…. these are the textures I always needed, but could never quite explain what I was looking for. Funky Aged old concert T… perfection. Thanks huge for making these available to all your fans!

  3. Thx Chris! Such a great effect! Could I ask you which font are you using for Washed & Worn? Thank you so much!

  4. Hey Chris just noticed, the instructions say to select All (cmd+a) then copy (cmd+a)? shouldn’t it be (cmd+c)?

    Thanks for the products and your brilliant tutorials
    Rick

    • Make sure that you alt+click directly on the layer mask before pasting. This will make sure that you’re working on the layer mask only.

  5. thx for the textures, I will play around and looking forward to see the magic :)

    I think Rick is right, copy with (cmd+c)…but I guess most of your fans know that already..

  6. Nice resource. I could have done with these a few years ago. I ended up making my own textures by photographing the street outside and processing the images in Photoshop.

  7. Well, now, these are different! I really like this effect! These will get used today! LOL Thank you, Chris!
    Su

  8. Super texture. Mais petite question. Comment faite-vous pour que les motif suive les plies des vêtements?

  9. Thanks, Chris! These are exactly what I’ve been looking for. They are so much more realistic for shirts than other textures I’ve tried.

  10. Are these directions just for PCs? Because I’m trying it on my Mac, with the most current version of Photoshop, and I cannot get the texture to paste into the mask.

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