Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Aged Newspaper Clippings Tutorial

Cephalopod Productions has posted an excellent tutorial on creating aged newspaper clippings.

As you probably know it, newspaper clippings are the most common prop used in call of cthulhu scenarios. And almost every published scenario will include some of them to hand to your players. But, most of the time these are simple, one article clippings with a very simple design and once printed they will only look like a piece of standard white paper with an article printed on it and a blank back. I never figured why people forgot so often that newspapers were printed recto-verso…




One of the subjects explored is the use of tea staining in combination with iron buff to produce varying levels of aging in a controlled manner. I had never tried using iron buff before one of Cephalopod's earlier articles, but now I'm a convert. It's a fantastically useful technique that can produce almost any degree of aging in paper and wood.

2 comments:

Mik said...

Very interesting, always useful to have various techniques for making these. I made a few for my Indiana Jones Grail Diary.

Rev. Marx said...

I've used the steel wool and vinegar solution to age wood, but never tried it on paper.

Another very quick and easy option for staining papers is Diet Coke. Very handy for when you have limited materials and need something fast and easy. But don't use regular Coke, the sugar will make the papers very tacky.