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Hi

Today I will try to create a an old parchment that looks like a page out of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Codex. As you probably know the Renaisance master kept several books with sketches ranging from mechanical inventions to art studies to anatomical studies. I will try to make a page that looks like it’s hand drawn using ink, making it look like an old and ruffled piece of paper. It will be like a study made by Leonardo on the spiral shape. The “Golden Spiral” is a geometry term that designates a spiral with a grow rate equal to the “Golden Ratio” - a number defining perfect proportions that was used by all great masters of the Renaisance. But enough background story, let’s begin….

I will start with an image of a snail shell, or is it a nautilus shell? Whatever…

Using the wand tool I carefully remove the background and get something like this

The same for the other shell. Good, now we have the 2 main items of the drawing. What we need now is the paper on which to draw. Ok, so it should look old and ruffled. What that means is that we have to somehow mix the 2 (old look and ruffled) like this: take an image of a ruffled paper like this one

and do some alpha blending it with a background yellow-old-paper (I used #DDCD7F but you can play in that area). If you do some very light burning on the image and then apply some blur to even the colors you should get something like this

Ok, now we have the paper to draw on, we have the subject, how do we get it ON the paper looking like it has been drawn there? Copy the snail in a layer over the paper. Let’s de-saturate it all the way, that’s right make it so it doesn’t have colors anymore. Now increase it’s contrast almost to the max… well, you decide to what point. Decrease the opacity of the snail layer to about half and you can also try and do a blending based on dark tones. If all goes well you should get something like this

Hey, looks pretty good! Let’s see what else can we add? We can add some other drawings using the same de-saturate and high contrast technique. Also let’s add some text… what would the master attach as a comment to the drawings? Well doing some research we find out that Leonardo made his notes using latin (probably using google translator as he was italian so he had no other way to speak a dead language). So we can do the same… unfortunately google doesn’t support latin any more (booooo!) but there are several other translators for latin out there. To make it sort of realistic I used a font that looks like hand writing (you can do a search on the internet, download it and install it). To make it even more realistic I have used some quotes from the master’s writings and also some words about the “golden spiral” - “spiralis aureus” in latin, and a description of Fibonacci numbers - remember the “golden ratio” or the perfect proportion mentioned earlier, well it has something to do with Fibonacci numbers.

Finally here is the result

Hope you enjoyed it and I’m waiting your comments and questions! I’m not too good detailing all the steps but if you don’t get some steps to work the same for you ask and I will try to help. Bye!