Anyone have advice or ideas for how to get a more worn or vintage look to this style?
I love the art of old film posters and have been trying to emulate the style in these crossover pieces for years now. The finished piece always looks off though. I wonder if anyone has advice for how to use or adjust brushes to achieve a more worn look/naturally painted look.
Id say more texture in the artwork, or adding a texture over everything as a whole. Ideally both. The first makes it less digital, the second makes it uniformly like a real poster.
The next thing is the correct use of color for the fonts. they contrast the artwork strongly, where the real posters it blends in with everything. they are also too sharp, which makes it look digital.
third, i would fade the colors selectively and add a gradient mask.
and then gradient mask over everything to bring it all together.
i hope i explained that well. lol
i hope that helps!
oh also for the brushes. adding a fine grain or noise pattern to the brushes.
changing the brush tips from solid a black to something with noise and a value range will help with a more painterly look.
and not blending/smudging as much.
those are tips for the brushes, but id say the main issue is texture and contrast.
old film posters didnt have a smudge tool, absolute black, or razor sharp pixel fonts.
so just paint without smudging, compress the value ranges, and either hand paint the fonts or add a small amount of blur to the text.
anyhow i dont know much about old film posters, so take what i say as an option, not necessarily the answer. getting it exact would require some research, but what i said is where i would start. lol
Ignoring the peculiarities of the medium… you kinda fail at capturing the style of the posters themselves. Like, you constantly use very smooth gradations/blend of colors when the posters you are imitating doesn’t do that at all. Your versions also lack the strong contrast in colors and values. The Pirate Planet (Forbidden Planet poster emulation) is the worst of the bunch where you didn’t even attempt to emulate the original style.
The details are also too well defined (like strands of hair, subtle textures, sharp thin lines, etc.), things which a poster would not be able to capture.
Im trying… I thought I could get help here.
Yes, your recommendations are very helpful! Thank you of taking the time to respond.
I will look into more tutorials for adding textures and grain to brushes and gradient masks. And values ranges.
I really am trying to get away from the digital look, figure out how to use this program… feeling hopeless at this point. Appreciate the support
I think these look quite good!
I’m not versed enough in vintage posters and there visual peculiarities, but you are nailing the general look that most of us would expect from one- But I can say that up-close they are a little too smooth, like what I would expect from a digital painting. A noise layer would help by adding some grain to the image, and maybe a texture overlay of some sort as well could work, tho sometimes that can look a little artificial when not properly blended into an image.
I know for getting an old comic book look using dots and chromatic aberration effects can be very useful, but that may not be what you are going for.
Either way, nice work!
if you want the artwork to look more like a poster, you can add a plastic texture overlay (i used two layers: the bottom one at 24% Screen and the top one at 32% Overlay, but you can tweak the settings to your liking).
you can also apply filter masks like Halftone with Independent channel mode to enhance the print effect, and Mean Removal to give it a sharper look.
@feboee Beautiful artworks! A lot of the vintage game box art, vintage movie poster illustrations, vintage advertising artwork, and vintage commercial illustrations of the 80’s and 90’s were painted in a smooth style with the airbrush (Example: Mick McGinty’s box art and promo artworks for several Street Fighter II games for the american and european market, or Larry Jost’s box art for Super Metroid) or with oils (Example: Julie Bell’s box art for Super Valis IV, Wolfenstein 3D, Demon’s Crest, and other games), and I think you have a very nice airbrush style that very well fits to emulate that vintage style. I particularly like that SNES Super Metroid artwork of yours, looks like Samus’ mother instinct took over and she decided to rather save the little harmless creatures instead of killing the monsters! Well done! If you want to achieve an additional “worn out look”, I wouldn’t change the painting style, but rather add painted additional little wrinkles or “wear and tear” marks (I am not sure if I use the correct english words) in the fringe / peripheral areas of the artworks, just look up how old cardboard game boxes look like (for example on ebay), with areas of worn out colors at the surfaces in the areas near the edges of the boxes (pretty similar for the posters) and paint these at an additional layer on top of the artworks.
Your work is actually good if taken by themselves. Nothing actually very bad about them. Each piece is a great work in their own right.
But, you are going for emulating specific looks. It is the emulation that you are failing and what I’m criticizing the pieces for. If you are going to emulate Picasso but end up doing a Monet or even Leonardo… Yeah, Monet and Leonardo are great, but they certainly are not Picasso.
So, I’m just kinda pointing you to a general direction about the style. Each poster you are emulating have their own distinct styles so no single way applies. You have to study the individual posters. But there are general similarities between the posters that I could point out.
From my reply: don’t do very smooth gradations/blend when the poster you are imitating doesn’t do it or didn’t do it as much. Pretty much all three posters you are trying to emulate doesn’t have very smooth gradations. What they have are actually closer to cell shading. Colors besides each other with very little if any blending.
The lack of contrast. All the three original posters have very strong contrast in color and values. This seem to be practically a defining trait of the three. In all your versions you flatten all of that. In the The Day The Earth Stood Still poster for example, the small figures on the lower left are strongly backlit in white (practically thick white outlines) which is then directly contrasted with a dark color or even black just directly next to it with almost no blending between them. It is the strongest application of the technique. That sharp contrast is gone from your version, no white backlight in all the figures. Your Pirate Planet is the worst sinner of this since the original poster uses this sharp contrast in every bit of it and you took it all away.
And then there are the details. You over rendered everything. You practically rendered thin strands of hair or individual feathers. Your outlines are also incredibly thin. These posters never do anything close to that mainly because the nature of the medium.
If you want, maybe I can try rendering small parts to show what I mean? I’m not very great artist myself though and I never tried doing anything like this but I do hope that I could show you what I mean.
And also, the others actually have very good ideas too that are worth trying. Kronos practically advice to lean into your own style and go for posters/art/illustrations that closely resemble yours. That is a good way to go forward. I mean, your own style is not bad at all, it is just not the style the posters you are emulating have.
By the way, the best one I think is The Bride of Nemesis. That one actually gets really close to the original style. You can do more of course to get the style (like reduce the amount of rendered detail), but this the closest one. A bit of filters and textures and that one might actually look like a vintage poster.
Thank you so much for the reply. Texture overlas and, yes, I need more grain in my diet. I will continue to try!
This is so so helpful!! Thank you so much for the taking the time to explain these specific recommendations and even provide screenshots. I am so grateful. Looking forward to trying these out
Thank you so much for the feedback and words of encouragement. They mean a lot <3
And that vintage game box art!! I have spent so much time looking at those. Honestly, its incredible how smooth they managed to make some of those look. Actually… every year for me and my partners anniversary I make a crossover piece like the movie posters above, but with some favorite game boxart and replacing the original characters with us. Some styles are more successfully emulated that others… This is a good reminder I should look into the names of the original artists and their processes more. And maybe post my attempt here so I can hear your feedback! 
Thank you
Hey, very late reply (& have edited 1 of your images here, will delete if you want) just wanted to point you towards exploring/ adding more image editing to your - already skilful - poster art.
I’m not very familiar with vintage posters but have a vague impression that we generally view them in their ‘worn’ state, not as they were produced at the time, so often with less saturated colours, faded detail & more texture than they began with
For attached I quickly added noise, altered lighting, shifted colour balance, added gradient maps (& for 1 image dithering it with a limited palette) all with a paper texture layer on top in multiply mode
This was just playing around with an app on my phone (Krita doesn’t live on my small old phone!) though you have loads of filters available in Krita
So just to say enjoy experimenting editing the art you’ve already made a bit more, & have those tools in mind when you’re next designing a poster 
Hi, saw your post so I wanted to head in and help if I can. Indeed your illustrations looks cool. To have an retro/old style in my mind the thing is to add imperfections (just like to make it realistic too)
I did a try on my end that is the following picture in my reply. To have that results I went on a website I like (not sure I can put it here with the forum rules but I can send it to you in private I think) and downloaded some paper texture to make it look torned / folded and a little bit degraded with time. I imported them onto my document file and played with the blending style (used Screen and Lambert Lightning (Gamme 2.2) in this case) and some filters to change the HSL of the image/invert it if needed. To make it look more realistic I like to add a random noise layer and play with the opacity of it and on top of that to add a little more contrast and depth used a Phong Bumpmap and like make it suit the settings I wanted. If you have questions or want more precisions don’t hesitate. Hope it helps in any ways.
