Kate Dehler’s illustrations bring to mind the Summer of Love, the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, and travel posters from yesteryear. Yet Dehler, who was born in the 1990s, doesn’t yearn for the past. “I think of nostalgia as an imaginary thing,” she says. “A nostalgia for how the world could be, or whatever kind of feeling you’re chasing. It’s not like I want to go back to the ‘70s — I do not.”

Recently, Dehler’s illustrations have appeared in the New York Times, Wired Japan, and the Washington Post, bringing a distinctive vintage look to articles. She finds inspiration by curating curious materials online. “I like looking at a lot of paper ephemera,” she says, speaking from her home in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. “I really like the sensibility behind some of these things, the color palettes, and the graphic approach. It just strikes a chord in me. It makes me a bit wistful.”

 

Download 5 Exclusive Kate Dehler Textures

 

Give your work the vintage look with these free textures from Kate Dehler.

Aged Paper

Dotty Textile

Brushed Watercolor

Scratchy Toner

Inky Grain

Kate’s tips:

 

You can add any of these textures to Adobe Photoshop files, usually on the top layer of your artwork. If you have your colors in separate layers, you can also clip a texture to a particular color.

  1. In the Layers panel, select a Blend Mode for your texture layer. Which Blend Mode you choose depends on which texture you’re using, what colors you’re blending with, and the look you want to achieve. I often use Multiply for Aged Paper, Divide for Inky Grain, Overlay for Brushed Watercolor and Scratchy Toner, and Color Burn for Dotty Textile.

  2. Layer additional textures if you like, trying different combinations and Blend Modes. Most of my work at the moment includes a texture like Scratchy Toner on Overlay combined with another texture, like Brushed Watercolor, on Color Burn. Setting a texture to Overlay can wash out your colors a bit, so it helps to layer another texture or a color layer above it on Color Burn to revive those colors and create a nice contrast.

  3. Play around with Opacity, and clip Levels adjustment layers to your textures if you want more control over the texture’s behavior.

How to use multiple textures in one image.

 

Add texture layers on top of artwork (top down):

  • Scratchy Toner, Color Burn, 36%

  • Scratchy Toner, Overlay, 42%

  • Aged Paper, Multiply, 98%

 

Clip a texture to the sky:

  • Brushed Watercolor, Color Burn, 67%

 

 

Kate's story, continued...

 

Dehler grew up in Maryland with a pencil in one hand, but chose a liberal arts college ahead of art school. Sketching remained a hobby. “I’ve been drawing for a really long time just for enjoyment and as a way to turn off other things in my life,” she explains. Over the years she found inspiration in children’s books, Milton Glaser’s psychedelic posters, and the work of Seymour Chwast’s Push Pin Studios. “This obviously influenced my sensibility,” she says. Dehler looked for a career in art and design.

“I thought I would be a graphic designer, and at one point I tried doing that,” Dehler says. She found a steady nine-to-five job as a designer and brand manager for a Chicago-based restaurant group, while working on passion projects at home. “I was just doing nights and weekends trying to get some editorial work out there,” she says. Slowly, Dehler built up commissions for esteemed magazines that most illustrators long to name as clients. She created surreal pieces including a ‘Swiss Army spatula’ for the Washington Post, and an artificial hamburger for MIT Technology Review.  

It was helpful that Dehler’s wife, Julia Dufossé, is an illustrator too. “We share a lot of the same inspiration. We often bounce ideas off each other which is really nice...I kind of watched what she was doing and followed her path a little bit,” Dehler says. She learned that it’s okay to email art directors out of the blue, while looking for work. “I send a couple of samples and a link to my website. Just straightforward and short.”

 

 

Taking the plunge

 

By 2020 the world was in lockdown due to the global pandemic, yet a career as a freelance artist beckoned. Having worked solidly since she was 15, it was hard to give up the comfort of a regular paycheck, Dehler says. “To be totally transparent, I saw that I can make way more money this way. A lot of things are possible in illustration.” She quit her day job in October of 2020.

Today, Dehler works on editorial commissions at home. In the fast-paced world of publishing, sometimes an art director will require sketches on the same day. “I usually provide three ideas per assignment,” Dehler says. “And then they review sketches, usually with their editors to get the concept right, and then they’ll give you notes, or they’ll pick one of your sketches. Then I move onto the final.” A tight deadline can spur an immediate flash of inspiration, but she admits: “Sometimes I get to better ideas if I have a little more time.”

Dehler works primarily on a tablet. “For editorial work, I usually just go straight to my iPad. I’m trying out Fresco because I love the brushes so much — the Kyle T. Webster brushes.” Her nostalgic textures, however, are made by hand with Dufossé. “We print out a bunch of printer paper covered in ink. And then we rub them around and crinkle them and smudge the ink around. Or we’ll use ink and a brush or something, or watercolor. And then we scan them back in and manipulate them in Photoshop. I just use them on different layers in Photoshop with different blending modes. And I adjust the levels, the Hue and Saturation, until it clicks.”

 

 

A win for introverts

 

Incredibly, Dehler has only been a full-time illustrator for a few months. “It feels like a leap I just made,” she says. “I like the idea that all I need is my brain. When I was working as a graphic designer I felt like I had to do a lot of executing on other people’s creativity. And now what I’m bringing to the table is something that’s just mine, in my head. That feels really rewarding to me.”

The pandemic has shifted the game in favor of artists like Dehler, who identifies as an introvert. “You used to have to cart around a box of your drawings and go into offices,” she says. Now you can build a relationship with editors over email. “The barriers are just so much lower now, so I feel compelled to take advantage of that.” Now, anyone with talent can build a career, wherever they live. “Other illustrators and designers I talk to live in small towns, they live in Nebraska and Ohio and stuff, and it’s like you don’t have to be in the city to be getting this work anymore.”

“I get a lot of Instagram DMs from people who are trying to start out in freelance, and they’re like, ‘how do you get a job with the New York Times?’” She likes to reply that art directors’ email addresses are available on the internet.

“So send them an email,” she says.

 

See more of Kate Dehler’s work on Instagram

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