Old Postcard Look
Hi Everyone,
I just finished a new digital painting. I love the look of those old style pin-up girl paintings, so I wanted to do a pin-up of my own. Here is the finished painting:

This is painted entirely in Photoshop and the only special brushes I used are called 'markerlines' and they can be found on brusheezy.com. I like to use these brushes instead of the usual 'drop shadow' brushes, because they have some texture to them, so the result looks more like a painting.
To create the 'postcard' look, I took the following steps:
Make sure the piece is on an unlocked layer, with another white layer behind it.
Use the rounded rectangle tool to create a path around the edges of the piece. You will have to figure out the appropriate radius, I used 80 but it could be as low as 20 depending on the resolution and size of your piece. Make a selection from the path, inverse the selection, then clear the selected area. You will end up like this:
Now we want to add the illusion of thickness to the card. If you look at some images of postcards, they usually have a bright white line right on the edge. This is from the thickness of the card, where there is no ink.

A really easy way to create this is to open up the blending options on the card layer and add an outer glow. We want the line to be quite sharp, so turn the spread up and the size down. I used a spread of %95 and a size of 2. Choose an off-white colour, and the default blend mode of screen will be fine here.
Next add a drop shadow in the blend options. Play with the settings until you like what you see.
Now were going to add the distressing. Distressing means adding a worn, weathered look. An old post card would have some wrinkles, scratches and areas where the ink has worn off. The ink would also be suffering with time, as inks tend to fade or change when exposed to the sun. Make a new layer on top of the card layer. You can find lots of good distressing brushes all over the internet. My favourite are 'typo-grunge' and 'ultimate grunge set3' from brusheezy.com. Using an off white colour, paint on some random distress and use different brushes and opacity.
When you're done, try playing with the blend mode of the distress layer. I used 'colour dodge' on mine, but there are other that work well too. Blend modes are incredibly useful, but sometimes it's difficult to know what they all do. My advice is to cycle through all of them and expirement and over time you will come to learn what they do. Now you'll have something like this:

Next, I want to add a paper stock texture to the piece, so it will look like it really was printed on paper. To do this, make a new layer and fill it with a paper texture. Photoshop comes with a nice paper texture already called Buff that you can find in the texture set, Color Paper. Again, we're going to use a blend mode to merge the card layer and the paper texture layer. Multiply will work well as it won't affect the colours on the card layer, but I still feel like the colours of the card piece don't look right. We are missing that faded, sun damaged look. Some of the inks will become more saturated over time; some will become faded. Happily, there is a blend mode that will fill both of our needs- overlay. Change the blend mode to overlay, and we have:
Play with the opacity of the distress and paper texture layer.
Now we need to add the text layer. I used Lucida Handwriting here and it comes with Photoshop. Then all we need to do is merge all the layers except the background and rotate them slightly.
Here is the finished product:
I added a little wrinkle at the bottom right corner for more realism. I think it looks pretty sweet. That's it!

Thanks for reading and I hope you found this helpful. You can use these techniques any time you want to distress something, not only for print but for 3d textures too. Everything in life is a little worn, and using a few of these distressing techniques will add a lot of realism to your work.