Monday, December 14, 2009

Vintage Tasmanian Postcard

Most of my paper props are pretty obscure, but this bit of ephemera is based on a single line from Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness":

As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbor on September 2nd, 1930, taking a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal, and stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place we took on final supplies.


Undoubtedly, the members of the Miskatonic expedition took advantage of the stop in Tasmania to post off their last letters and postcards home. This vintage postcard is exactly the kind of thing they would have found in the gift shops surrounding the port. Just click through for the full sized version, download to your computer, and print it out on cardstock.

3 comments:

James Floyd Kelly (Jim) said...

I'd love a tutorial on how you make your postcards - do you have a special place that prints them or do you make them yourself at Kinko's or with a color laser?

I love your Miskatonic U postcard... one of my favorite bits.

Propnomicon said...

@ Jim Kelly

For one-off's I use a laser printer that can handle 4 x 6 blanks, but runs of over 100 are farmed out to a regular printing company.

As with most paper props, the big problem with short runs is getting proper alignment between the front and back. You can print on both sides of an 8.5 x 11 sheet and trim it to size, but more often than not I run into alignment problems with that method. I find it easier to use a printer with a feed that can handle postcard sized cardstock.

josefk said...

I have pretty good luck with
Microsoft Publisher. You can resize images to whatever you need and with the rulers on the page you can get your front and reverse set up pretty accurately. If your printer doesn't feed perfectly, though, it can be a problem. Also, if you want super detail, you're better off with an inkjet printer. Common Laser printers don't give you quite as high resolution as injets do. At least not yet.