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Behind the Shop: The Story of True Grit Texture Supply

In this new Behind the Shop series, we want to let you in on their process, ideas, and creative point of view. This time around, we sat down with Andrew Fairclough, the talented shop owner behind True Grit Texture Supply.

Drew Coffman April 19, 2024 ยท 5 min read
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As you read this, there are hundreds of shop owners designing amazing tools around the world. In this new Behind the Shop series, we want to let you in on their process, ideas, and creative point of view. This time around, we sat down with Andrew Fairclough, the talented shop owner behind True Grit Texture Supply.

Andrew is an LA-based Australian illustrator, designer, and art director who has created some of this marketplace’s most popular grungy textures. Having learned what buyers are into when it comes to texturing tools, his advice on turning your assets into an online business is golden. Check out the video or read the full transcript below.

Meet Andrew


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Transcript

Andrew Fairclough: My name is Andrew Fairclough, I’m a freelance illustrator and designer and I’ve been selling digital products on Creative Market for about three or four years now.
Creative Market: What kind of work do you do and what tools do you use?
AF: My work’s quite known for texture and that kind of thing so that all kind of starts clean and is then destroyed at the end. I primarily work in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I also work in Procreate a little bit for sketching on an iPad. Because I’ve been doing this for long enough and I’m old I can’t hunch over a tiny little iPad for too long. So that’s why I have this thing and a sit-stand desk.
Because I work with a lot of texture, I like to get in close and I like to work big. So I can focus on small details which I find is pretty hard to do on a much smaller screen. That’s just me. The iPad is a beautiful thing to draw on as well and Procreate’s a fantastic app. So I kind of like doing a bit of both.
CM: How did you start True Grit Texture Supply?
AF: I taught some online courses, making analog textures, scanning them, and then converting them for use in Photoshop and Illustrator. A lot of students started to ask, “do you sell any of your textures or brushes or anything like that?”, and I was like, maybe I should do that. And then I thought I could at the very least just put that stuff on Creative Market. Once I thought about it, well, one product’s not enough. I want to come up with a suite of products. So I went through my archive of shortcuts and texture tools that I’ve made over the years and started distilling them down into a bunch of usable and sellable products.
Predominantly, I’m selling products that are very texture-focused and mostly in brush form. And then it’s a lot of effects kits that allow people to apply different mid-century or photocopy print effects that took me years and years and years through trial and error to figure out. But you can achieve these looks, through your own experimentation you might never come to.
I guess as a rule, and one of the big driving forces behind my products, is customization. They have to work for professional designers and illustrators that are at a very high level. I try to make stuff that a novice can use but there’s a minimum amount of experience using Photoshop or Illustrator that you need to use them.
I want to make products where the product isn’t the end result, it’s just a tool to get you to add to the creativity of your own work.
CM: Who are you making products for? Other makers?
AF: Yeah, it’s definitely makers themselves. It’s a lot of designers and illustrators who have a screen-printed, printmaking aesthetic. A lot of our customers are working on clients in streetwear, action sports, music, film. A lot of comic makers and indie comic makers, indie game makers. It’s been really cool to make products that they’re as useful for a small online comic maker as much as they are for Marvel or Disney or DC.
CM: How has True Grit Texture Supply changed your role as a designer?
AF: For me, Creative Market’s a little bit of an experiment in the sense of the cream rising to the top. If the product is good enough, people will find it. Having my products found by the right users โ€” I think the idea of infinite growth and being all things to all people was just kind of silly. I want to make the best products I can make for a specific type of aesthetic and then connect with like-minded creatives who also want to integrate some of those aesthetics into their work in order to grow their own creative practice. I think Creative Market is perfect for that.
It’s a perfect point of entry for somebody starting out making their own templates or brushes or whatever, because they don’t need to go through that time and expense of building their own platform and generating an independent following. Having that additional income that can stabilize your income. When I first started out, I could pay one week of my rent every month. At the end of the month it was like, “oh my god, this is so great to not to have to pay this one week’s studio rent.”
And then as the business has grown, that just compounds it exponentially. At one point, two years ago, it gave me the flexibility to take a couple of months off to just focus on a solo art show. I could never have done that without having a store on Creative Market. You can’t really put a dollar figure on that.

Stay tuned for more!

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Shop Owner Kit
Templates & guides to grow your shop
Download your free kit

The Creative Market Shop Owner Kit includes editable branding templates for your storefront, handy cheatsheets, and an in-depth PDF guide.

Get it here
About the Author
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Drew Coffman

Creative Market's Community Manager ๐Ÿ‘‹ I love helping creatives put their work into the world ๐Ÿ’ซ

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