Queen Victoria Early British Stamps Substance

Personal project, 2025. Parametric substance that can generate a wide range of variations for the earliest British postage stamps - featuring the portrait of Queen Victoria. The original stamps were issued between 1840 and 1864. The "One Penny Black" was infact the first postage stamp in the world. I added exposed parameters for colors, cancels, perforations and variations of the corners and corner fonts.

This project was sitting unfinished on my harddrive for a couple years. I'm a stamp collector and i always had this idea of creating a Substance based on stamps. Doing the engraved portraits faithfully in a procedural workflow however is difficult and tedious so this remained a WIP for a long time. But recently i watched a video about old British coins and they mentioned that Queen Victoria had a wax portrait made that was used as reference for both her stamps and her coins. So that gave me the idea to work from the image of a silver coin for her portrait. I still wanted the substance to be very procedural so instead of using the image directly i generated a normal and depth map and used these as inputs to guide procedural hatchings and masks.