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October 22, 2007 6:46 AM Subscribe
How to make realistic fake newspaper obits and gravestones for a party?
It's time for the annual kids' Halloween party, and my 12-year old has requested that we make fake (funny) realistic obits or gravestone faces of her friends to be pasted on poster board to be hung around the party room. (Example for skater friend: "Susie died tragically when a Zamboni, mistaking her for a large ice ball, permanently melted her into the ice") You get the idea. I have Print Shop and Photo Shop, but didn't know if there was an online tool or generator for making aged, creepy-looking obits or tombstone faces. Any ideas? I'm fairly competent with both programs if there's no online tools available, so ideas for those are also welcome.
It's time for the annual kids' Halloween party, and my 12-year old has requested that we make fake (funny) realistic obits or gravestone faces of her friends to be pasted on poster board to be hung around the party room. (Example for skater friend: "Susie died tragically when a Zamboni, mistaking her for a large ice ball, permanently melted her into the ice") You get the idea. I have Print Shop and Photo Shop, but didn't know if there was an online tool or generator for making aged, creepy-looking obits or tombstone faces. Any ideas? I'm fairly competent with both programs if there's no online tools available, so ideas for those are also welcome.
Best answer: I've done this before. I actually scanned in an obit page from the paper, then scanned in a blank area of the newsprint and cloned out some of the entries. Then typeset in my own, matching the typeface as best I could.
For tombstones, I would experiment with patterns & stuff (if you do a google search you can probably find some free stone textures for photoshop to download), Then to do the names, I'd add a layer style to emboss the text and make it look chiseled in.
posted by miss lynnster at 7:42 AM on October 22, 2007
For tombstones, I would experiment with patterns & stuff (if you do a google search you can probably find some free stone textures for photoshop to download), Then to do the names, I'd add a layer style to emboss the text and make it look chiseled in.
posted by miss lynnster at 7:42 AM on October 22, 2007
Ooh, fun. It doesn't really answer your question but I found this Random Obit Generator which would be pretty fun for kids. You could change the text to suit your party guests. I'll keep looking for ideas for printing obits and tombstone faces.
posted by KathyK at 7:56 AM on October 22, 2007
posted by KathyK at 7:56 AM on October 22, 2007
Best answer: Here's a jpeg of Old Paper that you can use as a base. There's the Newspaper Clipping Generator too. I also found some tombstone templates. Good luck!
posted by KathyK at 8:15 AM on October 22, 2007
posted by KathyK at 8:15 AM on October 22, 2007
Best answer: Here's a PS Tutorial on a time-honor method of "distressing" an image (in this case, a newspaper page) using displacement mapping. If you do it full bore, it looks crumpled. If you pull back a bit on the embossing, it merely looks old and creepy. Play with the Levels and Hue/Saturation ... give it a faint yellowish tinge and yer good to go.
It's quite clever. You'd be doing a mock-up of a newspaper page in TIME ROMAN font (or whatever). Toss in an appropriate image from GIS, fake a banner headline, well, you get the idea.
It's quite convincing.
posted by RavinDave at 11:22 AM on October 22, 2007
It's quite clever. You'd be doing a mock-up of a newspaper page in TIME ROMAN font (or whatever). Toss in an appropriate image from GIS, fake a banner headline, well, you get the idea.
It's quite convincing.
posted by RavinDave at 11:22 AM on October 22, 2007
Response by poster: Thanks to all of you! What a great party it was, too. I ended up doing a mix of things. I used miss lynnster's suggestion and found a jpg of granite, then snagged a font called "I still know" from this website to make my tombstones. Then I used KathyK's old paper jpg to make obits.
I got one of those 50 foot plastic wall murals of a graveyard from the Party Store, and then taped the tombstones onto the mural randomly to make them look like they were in the graveyard. The kids loved finding their tombs on the wall. I made a faux newspaper out of all of the obits and scattered them around the party room.
Happy Halloween!
posted by Flakypastry at 5:14 AM on October 31, 2007
I got one of those 50 foot plastic wall murals of a graveyard from the Party Store, and then taped the tombstones onto the mural randomly to make them look like they were in the graveyard. The kids loved finding their tombs on the wall. I made a faux newspaper out of all of the obits and scattered them around the party room.
Happy Halloween!
posted by Flakypastry at 5:14 AM on October 31, 2007
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posted by JeremiahBritt at 7:31 AM on October 22, 2007