hello! I just finished Pentiment and i LOVE your art of Magdalene Druckeryn. I was wondering if you had any advice on how to make art really look like it comes from real pages? I love the fading of the blue background into something more worn and all the gold textures- everything looks so tangible and delicious. I'm doing a medieval manuscript style piece for art fight and I would love any tips or anything! Thank you <3
so, half of the answer is just photographs--I use a blank folio from a public domain digitized manuscript for the parchment background, and I use a photo of gold leaf on a clipping mask layer for the gold (mostly because I've tried a few "metallic" brushes and none of them look right, and drawing the texture myself would take about three million years).
for the rest of it, I use this brush set, particularly the fun gouache-ish 2, sparse and gritty, and big and dusty brushes to get the kind of worn texture to the colors--I'll usually do the base layer for everything in the gouache brush, and then use a lighter shade with less pressure to make it look a bit more faded, and then the sparse and gritty/big and dusty on low opacity to add a bit more texture to it!
I also spend a loooot of time looking at manuscripts for realistic patterns of wear on the illustration and on the parchment itself, which can also help you figure out where to make things look a bit more worn out in your own drawing. there are like one million digitized manuscripts floating around from museums, libraries, and university special collections out there that you can peruse for this!
