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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When I originally made my card about the only usable picture available to me was a shot of Johnson standing with his hands on hips .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.
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