Dear Readers - I'd like to give my vectors a more vintage/retro feel by adding some textures eg. make a book cover design look grubby and well read.

There are tutorials out there but most talk about importing a texture file from PS - which is fine but none of them cover whether this creates bitmaps and if so how to overcome it to avoid bitmap rejections. Is it a question of just expanding appearance? Are there alternatives inside Illustrator I can use? Anyone found a decent tut that might help?

(The attached is similar to the effect I am trying to reproduce)

Pointers/Suggestions much appreciated.......Ed

You can scan (or photograph) a texture and do a live trace, or use the Illustrator brushes that look like paint or ink at a large width and expand those. If you scan or photograph be careful that there's no copyright. iStock will insist you tell them where you get any grunge textures or they will reject your images.

I'm sure other illustrators have more ideas.

Thanks for the help. I've got photos in my own port I can use. I'll have a look at the brushes also.

I think that there are only two solutions:
1) You convert your texture in path with live trace in Illustrator, but you risk to loose a lot of details, or to get a file with so much points that the weight will be over the acceptable limit.
2) You export the whole image (texture + vector) to jpeg loosing the advantage of a vectorial file. Consider that if you can produce a 25 Mpixels jpeg you do not really need a vectorial file for most of the uses.
Personally I prefer to use the second solution.

Is like what everybody said....

For a realistic texture the best is to have the texture in black and white bitmap and use it with adobe illustrator, I know some people in silk screen who use this method when they photograph a physical object for the texture - because you are able to get all the details - however that will not be accepted into microstock... so you would have to vectorize.

Like everybody said people do "expand" fill so the TIF or JPG  and that will become a vector, and the only downsize is that you will lose some detail in the process.

You will have to play with the settings of the live tracing feature  to see how much of the detail you are willing to lose - because if you get a lot of detail, that's a lot of anchor points and ---that make files pretty big,  in some cases that will slow down some computers...I did that once to get a realistic texture, and it was too slow to work with it.