Add a touch of vintage style to your design with a velvet Victorian backdrop. This goes great with backgrounds for websites and flyers. We will finish off by showing you how to change the color of the velvet design to any shade of your choice.




Start of by finding a Victorian pattern/wallpaper. A google image search for “Victorian wallpaper” or “Vintage wallpaper” should do the trick, just make sure you have permission to use the image in your artwork. Below is the pattern I will be using.

Note the pattern you find can be of any color. We are going to stat off by greyscaling it to apply the velvet effect. To do this go to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation and reduce the saturation to its limit of -100 as shown.

Next create a new layer, choose two shades of grey, one light and one darker to greate a diamond gradient. Place the gradient off centre and stretch it out so it blends smoothly.

We will now move this gradient layer under the pattern layer. Set the pattern layer’s effect to “Difference” and reduce the opacity down to 86%.

For this next step you’re going have to realize on your own intuition. When looking at an actual velvet fabric you will notice that optics of it change depending on where the light hits it and where you view it. We will replicate this by using inverted colors via the gradient layer we created.


To do this, we first create a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer above the gradient layer (if you don’t know how to do is have a read through our Beginners guide to Photoshop). We will play around with the brightness and contrast until we see a smooth transition between the inverted colors.

In the first result we got above, we notice that the transition isn’t as smooth as we like it so we will leave the Brigtness/Contrast settings as is, and instead play around with the gradient tool again, dragging out new gradients and seeing how they turn out. We find a smoother transfer after a few attempts as shown below

We notice however that the image is too bright for our liking. We create another Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer above the pattern this time. We will play around with the settings to darken the image while at the same timing showing a velvet contrast.

It still looked a little too bright for our liking so we tweaked the other adjustment layer as well with the setting shown below.

At this point your velvet effect is done and you can choose to flatten the layer if you wish. To add some color to the velvet, create a new Color Balance adjustment layer above all the others and play around with the sliders to get your desired shade.

We went with the black velvet and added some text to create a spiffy elegant logo.

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