Do you love Monkey Island? Of course – Everyone loves Monkey Island! Unfortunately, only few props (If it can be called props) are out there – Most of them are shadow boxes, but I wanted to have something more magic. And, last but not least – It must be feasible with my abilities and equipment…
So I crawled through the game to find something that fits to my “needs”. I finally ended up in a scene pretty much at the beginning of the game. At this point you ended Largo’s embargo and you are ready to sail away with Captain Dread. And what does Captain Dread needs to sail away? Exactly: A map.
And this is what it is all about in this post. Let me show you how even YOU can do it yourself.
Requirements
First, you need the game data or a suitable screenshot of that map. For copyright reasons, I can’t post one here 🙁 If you have the game, you can use Scumm Revisited to extract the image. On their site, you’ll find all necessary instructions.
When you have the image, print it out – For more “authenticity”, I recommend 200g/m² paper. What you have now, should look like that:
Make Captian Dreads Map antique
We will follow a quite simple way to age the paper, so it will look more authentic.
Preparation
Make coffee. Strong coffee. REALLY strong coffee. Use three times more coffee than usually. Then let it cool down.
Let’s do it
Now, fold the paper, put it carefully into the water, and make sure, that it is soaked through with water. Be careful to not soak too much, otherwise, you will destroy it. Pro-tip: Put some baking soda into the coffee to neutralize the acid. Then the colors will remain better.
To dry it, you have basically two options: Let it dry on the air (Takes longer) or put it into the oven. I went for the oven. Keep the temperature low (Below 100° C), otherwise, you risk to “bake” the paper which results in very dark areas.
Your own antique treasure map
And then we got it. It was that simple 🙂 Excluding the search for the image, it took me about 30 minutes.
One last tip: You can antiquify the map even more with slightly singing the edges. But be very carefully!
Yes, I know, there are the thumbs. If you are a Photoshop professional, you can try to remove them, of course 🙂 For me, it’s fine.
