Hanging a vintage poster in your home or office can be a great way to add character to any room. Vintage posters can range from a "Rosy the Riveter" poster to a reproduction of the original theatrical poster for "Wizard of Oz" to a Norman Rockwell "Saturday Evening Post" illustration. When making a vintage poster you will either be attempting to reproduce a vintage design, or be designing a new image that has elements that are meant to mimic a vintage look. There are a number of ways to approach the process of creating your own vintage poster.
Instructions
1. Make sure you consider any copyright issues before printing someone else's work. Go to online image sites such as the Library of Congress Digital Collection, and search for images that are in the public domain. In the United States, any work before 1922 is in the public domain and can be used for any private or commercial use. If your local library has a collection of pre-1922 images or posters, you could scan them and burn them to a CD. Of course, generally speaking, if you are just making the poster for your own use and are not intending to sell it, you don't have to be quite so careful about copyright.
2. Design a vintage-like poster in Photoshop. If you have even basic graphic design skills, you can create a vintage-like poster using a program like Photoshop. Many images that are considered "vintage" have a simplified design premise, so you don't have to be a trained artist to create a vintage design. It can be as simple as using the Pen tool to cut an image of a couple from a photo you have, pasting it onto a dramatic background, such as waves crashing, and then producing an appropriate text in an interesting font.
3. Save your poster as a JPEG. Instead of trying to print it yourself, consider having a poster made using an online printer like Finerworks. Or have it printed at a print shop like Staples or Kinko's. You can also use a quality paper to print smaller images and then frame them yourself, but unless you have a very large-scale printer, you are better off letting the professionals do the big ones.
4. Consider what type of paper on which you want your poster printed. You might want a simple poster board print if it's going to hang on a dormitory wall. But if you intend to display your poster as art in a more formal setting, you might want to print on quality paper or canvas and have it professionally framed.
