Last night I created my own template for the 1965 Topps cards. I absolutely love the Reds’ yellow-and-blue design from ’65, so I made a few classic and modern cards with the template.
UPDATE: One of the members of Facebook’s “Custom Baseball Cards” group asked me to create a card for his “2nd favorite Red,” Eric Davis. I love Eric the Red, too, so here’s that card:
Not every design works. Sometimes, a design will just come together in a few minutes. And then there are times when I slave over a design for hours, and still never get something I feel is good enough to post (and sometimes I look back on designs I’ve posted and wonder, “What was I thinking?”). Here are a few cards that have never been posted before. They’ve been in my folder for a long time, but I’m not a big fan of ’em, for whatever reason.
If you see any of these that you like, please let me know. I’m always interested in what people think of my designs.
These 5 custom designs have been gathering dust in my “cards to psot” folder for quite a while. I’m not really thrilled about any of them, but I don’t hate any of them, either. They’re all just kinda…decent, in my opinion.
I think my favorites are the Bench and the VanMeter with the “2020” flag, but I feel like both designs are still missing something.
One of the main reasons I started this blog was to document my progress with different Photoshop techniques. One of the skills I’ve been trying to improve lately is the ability to remove the backgrounds from photos.
There are free services that will do this for you, like Remove.bg, but those sites reduce the image size. I try to work with only high-res images, so this is a problem. The images I post here are scaled down to roughly 1/4 of their original size. I would post the full versions, but I’ve been warned that shady characters out there are likely to try to sell them on eBay.
Lately I’ve been working on removing backgrounds with Photoshop’s “Quick Selection Tool.” It takes more time than the free services, but maintains the full image resolution.
I love the 2019 MLB post-season logo, so I used it as the starting point for this design.
I created several different versions of this design before landing on this one. The placement of the name was the part that took the longest – I tried it at the top, on the left side, and then at the bottom. I chose the version with the red bar at the bottom, since it brings together the red from the home plate element.
I wanted to try this design with another team, just to see how the design holds up for other colors. So…here are the first non-Reds custom cards I’ve ever created.
Here are the 3 of the Astros:
I also created a couple of cards for the A’s:
And finally, I made a horizontal version of the card:
NOTE: Big thanks to Frank Jewett from Facebook’s Custom Baseball Cards group. Frank suggested a couple of small revisions that really improved the overall look of this design.
When I found the Luis Catillo picture, I knew I had to do something with it. So I immediately started working on a design that, I hoped, would bring more focus on the photo than the other design elements.
Then I found the Votto pic yesterday, and it seemed like a natural fit for the same design. I’d love to add more cards to this series, but I don’t think it will be easy to find more photos with this same style.
Sorry to get that Smash Mouth song stuck in your head. Today, I’m posting a couple of cards I made to honor the two Reds pitchers who were appeared in the 2019 All-Star game: Luis Castillo and Sonny Gray. Castillo should have been the starter, but…it wasn’t my decision.
These cards are based on the 1975 Topps design, but with some significant redesigns. (To be totally transparent, I first saw one of these redesigned ’75 cards on some other blog a loooong time ago. I wish I could remember where so I could give the original designer credit. If it was you…let me know!)
Lastly, I’d like to give a shout-out to Jason Carter and his blog, The Writer’s Journey. Some of the Reds cards I saw on his site are what inspired me to start this blog, and he was even kind enough to share some of my designs on his site.
Alternate Reds 