The BC Lions never made bubblegum trading cards for their 1977 team. So, thirty-seven years later, I decided to fix that oversight. I figured I could make my own trading card, and with the help of my trusted printer friends, I did exactly that. Mind you, I only made one card so there won't be a lot of trading, but it looks authentic to the 1970's in as many details as I could muster.
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| Front view. |
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| Back view. |
I started by creating a rotoscope of several different elements that I composited in Photoshop, including the head, body, helmet, grass, stadium, and background. Then I painted over everything by hand in Corel Painter to unify the style. You may have seen the final picture already when I posted the artwork in JSVB Post #1011, which you can see by clicking here.
I brought the poster-sized image back down to card size and created a frame typical for a 1970's era trading card. Then I ran the image through some colour filters to make the ink look junky and the card stock look old.
The card stock was a problem, since it would have been prohibitively expensive to print one card on authentic stock. So I used a modern card stock that was printed on two 12-point cards. These cards were printed, cut, and glued back-to-back to make a card with a realistic 24-point thickness. To the card on the back I digitally created the look of very cheap card stock and ink. If you look at it with a magnifying glass, you can see that the effect is purely digital. It's convincing from a couple of inches away or more, though. I think my printer was a little puzzled why I would go through so much trouble to make his best inks look so shoddy. The work speaks for itself, though.
Here, I presented the card to the real-life player from 1977, who happens to sit in my section, and who my wife and I have no doubt deafened as we shout and yell at the players during the game.
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