Sunday, May 24, 2015

"The Rock" custom card gets a rehab

New
Old

Being retired, holiday weekends don't mean the same thing to me that they did when I was on somebody else's clock.

When I was working, holiday weekends usually meant I had the time to work up a new custom card.

Now, I can work on my custom projects just about any time the notion strikes, but I still find myself gravitating to my to-do list on holidays.

This past Memorial Day was no exception.

My principal project for the weekend was re-habbing my 1955 Topps All-American custom card of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.

I originally created the card 7-8 years ago. Shortly thereafter, however, a mini disaster struck and I lost the computer files for three or four of my custom cards, including my '55 Rock.

These days, I have more backup for my custom card files. Some might suggest I have gone into overkill backup. I have a set of files on both my home and office computer hard drives, and I have complete sets on two different flash drives. 

Since I had already printed my archives copies of the card, I was able to recreate the file by scanning my card. That, however, didn't produce a truly first-rate result; the card now had a re-screened look. That might not have been readily apparent to the average person, but it nagged at me.

Surprisingly, my Dwayne Johnson '55 custom is not a card for which I have had a lot of requests from collectors and fans over the years, so there was never a great impetus for me to re-create the piece.

The other day I had occasion to do an internet search for images of Johnson in his Miami Hurricanes uniform and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the number of such images has grown a bit in recent years.

When I originally made my card about the only usable picture available to me was a shot of Johnson standing with his hands on hips . . . satisfactory, but not exceptional.

To re-do my card I chose a shot of Johnson in a celebratory pose that fits nicely into my cards' horizontal format. Shown here are the before and after photos.

While I was working on the back, I noticed a typographical error on my original card. In the first line I had omitted the word "a" between "earned" and "National". That's now corrected.

New
Old



No comments:

Post a Comment

Your comments, criticism, additional information, questions, etc., are welcome . . . as long as they are germane to the original topic. All comments are moderated before they are allowed to appear and spam comments are deleted before they ever appear. No "Anonymous User" comments are allowed.