Well it’s been just over a week now since I began creating my updated versions of the 1984-85 OPC set featuring the goaltenders of today and I have just put the finishing touches on 27 of them. I chose to do 27 rather than all 30 simply because 27 makes for exactly three nine-card pages.
I went with strictly goaltenders for this set and for good reason. They are the only ones who can express themselves through their equipment, especially the mask, and that makes goaltender the best position in sports. I've always loved the different mask designs as well as the pad designs and color schemes so going with all goaltenders just made sense.
It's been another learning process to say the least. I found myself constantly changing the images and color schemes. I decided to make several slight changes from the original OPC design, only because I did not want to have the color pink as part of the designs.
Here we go with the first nine.
As you can see, I made changes to all of the original nine except for the Hiller, Miller and Harding. Of this first set, my favorites would have to be the Thomas and Vokoun, both have interesting action shots, unlike most of the others, I'll explain that later.
The hardest part of the process was finding just the right action and close-up image for every goalie. I tried to come up with a variety of shots, but it was difficult to find many usable images of only the goalie with no other players or officials in the foreground or background, which is why most of the action shots are simple butterfly or standing poses.
Now on to the next set.
Out of these nine, my favorites would have to be the Lundqvist and Elliott again because of the unique action shots. The rest are fairly simple, although I tried to mix it up a bit with shots like Ward playing the puck and Price skating around.
It was a painstaking process scouring Google images and the team website photo galleries for the right shots, but in the end I think the effort was well worth it. It was difficult to find many hi-res images so that's why a few of the action shots don't look as good.
Now on to the final set.
In this set, I tried to incorporate some other types of shots, like the Kipprusoff and Khabibulin. It did get even more difficult to find usable images for some of the lesser known goalies, but I managed to find something to work with.
Overall I would say this first attempt at creating my own custom set came out fairly nicely. The design was simple, one, because all I did was recreate it, and two, it is a basic geometric design without any gradients or complex elements. This set has given me some other ideas as far as recreation of older sets, so hopefully I will have more in the future.
For now though, I am working on a set I designed from the ground up. I've only completed two of them so far but I must say they look amazing. I'm also still working on a name for this one, I'll be sure to post them when they're all completed.
