Rest In Peace, Friends

October 22, 2007 6:46 AM

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.

posted by Flakypastry to media & arts (8 comments total)

On one side of the paper print out a full size scan of a random newspaper page. On the other side, print the obit (modeled after one found in your local paper), in the center of the page. Cut it out by hand. Make tea/coffee and experiment with painting it on the scraps left over. It should look pretty good after you experiment a bit.
posted by JeremiahBritt at 7:31 AM on October 22, 2007

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

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

Here's a great idea - use a newspaper generator!
posted by kdern at 8:00 AM on October 22, 2007

Or a tombstone generator!
posted by kdern at 8:00 AM on October 22, 2007

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

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

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