I haven’t really felt like making any new cards in a while. But now that the season appears to be back on track, the Reds are giving me new reasons to keep supporting them.
Votto sported this BLM t-shirt during batting practice the other day, and Amir Garrett proved that he could hit the high 90’s in the Arizona heat while wearing a mask (so you probably don’t have an excuse to not wear one when you go to pick up your groceries).
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.
Here’s a random sampling of some of my 1971 custom card designs. These were all created at different times over the past few months.
Some are landscape, some are recolored, some are from 1971, some are modern, some are from a different template.
The 1976 Topps set was one of the first that I collected as a kid, so I’ve always had a soft spot for that design. Ever since I started this blog, I’ve wanted to be able to recreate that design. The problem was those little position icons on the lower left. I couldn’t find clean versions of those icons to work with, and without those, the whole card just looked bad.
Fortunately, Bob Jonas from the Custom Baseball Cards group was kind enough to share a set of icons that he had cleaned up. I worked in Photoshop to try to nail every little detail of the 1976 design – from the fonts down to the exact borders around those icons.
Here are the results – 6 alternate cards for the 2020 Reds. I even made one for the newest Red, Travis Jankowski. Janky plays every OF position, so he’ll probably get a chance to play a lot in early 2020, especially if Senzel isn’t ready for the start of the season.
I wanted to create a card design that would show a little more of each player’s personality, so I’m working on a design that will show one of the player’s recent tweets. I’m still playing with this idea, but here are a couple of early test cards:
UPDATE: After playing with the design a bit more, I ended up here:
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.
The Reds’ 2019 season didn’t end the way I wanted it to, of course, but it wasn’t without its share of highlights. I created these 3 cards, based on Topps’ 1975 Highlights series, to honor my three favorite things about this season.
Aquino’s 2019 is one of my all-time favorite seasons by any player, ever. They way he burst into the majors was an amazing thing to witness.
And when Garrett charged at the Pirates’ dugout, he gave us a bit of hope that there was still some life in this team.
And Geno’s record-breaking home run pace down the stretch kept things interesting even when the playoffs were well out of reach. He set new records for the number of home runs in a season by National League third basemen, and also broke the record for most homers in a season by a Venezuelan.
I posted two of these on Facebook’s Custom Baseball Cards group the other day, so I thought I’d throw ’em all up here.
These cards use the same colors as the 1975 Highlights cards for Bob Gibson, Al Kaline & others. How in the world did Topps come up with this color scheme in 1975?
Aquino hit number 14 last night. Unreal. I’ve posted a ton of Aquino cards already, though, so today’s cards are a new set of customs featuring Joey Votto and Amir Garrett.
Votto has already locked up his place in the Reds’ Hall of Fame, of course, and Garrett became a fan favorite this year when he charged in to fight the entire Pittsburgh Pirates’ bench.
The Votto cards are brand new custom designs of mine, and the Garrett card is a bit of a tribute to the 1956 Topps design.
Alternate Reds 