Human Anatomy text cover - final art
This vintage human anatomy textbook was a scripted prop that required both a cover and two page spreads, one of which would specifically feature an anatomical illustration of the intestines. For the cover I layered several leather textures together to achieve a rich, deep red in colour, with cracked and faded areas, and with a reinforced leather spine. The title, author, and decorative embellishments were added to look like gold foiling, and then digitally aged and faded. The finished design was then printed on canvas, to give the closest approximation of the texture of leather, and the prop book was rebound with it. Below you can see the different leather stock images I used to develop the base of the graphic above.
the collection of stock images used to create the leather texture
For the interior page spreads, we began looking at authentic vintage anatomy illustrations and texts that are in the public domain, and came across the work of Jacques Fabien Gautier d'Agoty, an eighteenth century anatomist and painter. His paintings have a velvety richness in tone that we found very appealing, despite the grisly subject matter, as you can see below in the original, unedited artwork.
Jacques Fabien Gautier d'Agoty's original anatomical paintings
I obtained permission to use both the illustrations and scanned pages of the original textbook they came from - Anatomie générale des viscères en situation, de grandeur et couleur naturelle, avec l'angeologie, et la neurologie de chaque partie du corps humain, love a concise title, don't you? - and began editing together the elements into two page spreads (below).
As you can see in the detail images below, I distressed the illustrations and softened the edges to try and make them look blended with the paper texture underneath, and add both some aging and a suggetion of ink bleeding.
the completed prop
