Saturday, January 26, 2013

Cardboard Creations: Metal Universe

It's been way too long now since I've actually sat down and knocked out a full set of custom card designs. Since May of 2012 actually. That said, my last post got me thinking about how I would design my own Metal Universe set, something I was actually playing around with in Inkscape back as far as last year. Anyway, I've been working on these for a few hours today and thought I would show off what I came up with. 

Here is one of the nine featuring Alex Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals:


I wanted to reuse as much of the original design as I could as far as the bottom of the card goes. I kept the same basic shape and color scheme, minus the player and team names. It actually wasn't all that difficult to recreate the Metal Universe logo portion of the design. The hardest part was getting the exact shape to match by manually adjusting the points on the trace lines I created. 

For the backgrounds, I thought I would go with some more fractals, which I made great use of in my "Fractal Mask" sets a while back. These are always different and there's plenty of them available on the internet.

Now here are all nine of them together:


What do you think of my attempt at a reboot of the Metal Universe set? Like the mockups that UD posted on their blog, these closely replicate the original 1996-97 version. I can only hope that the version they are coming up with looks something like these.

12 comments:

  1. Those are cool!

    The "glowiness" on the players makes them seem a little fuzzier and don't pop much out of the card.

    That's all technical terms BTW.

    Great job.

    Do you do backs?

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    1. Thanks!

      I was on the fence about the glowiness, but ended up leaving it in there.

      And as far as backs, I haven't done them, at least not yet. Definitely something to think about.

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  2. Greetings from Russia!
    These cards are just crazy,amazing work!
    I'm waiting Fleer Retro product,may be will try a PMG ruby set )

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    1. Thank you! It would be awesome to build one of the PMG sets. We'll just have to wait and see how exactly this set is configured.

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  3. Dude, unreal! I would buy a box of those in a heartbeat. Not sure how it would work out with copyright/licensing but have you ever considered printing hard copies of some of your designs? Would be cool to include one or two whenever you sent out a trade package. Nice work!

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    1. Thanks! I've thought about it and was actually asked to do so for my Fractal Masks sets by someone on SCF last year. In the end, I decided not to because I don't want to risk any of the copyright/licensing issues you mentioned. Although, it would be pretty awesome to have some to send out with trades and what not.

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  4. These are awesome! Loved Metal Universe products from the 90's.

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    1. Thanks! The 96-97 set is definitely one of my favorites.

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  5. Very cool! These look like they can be an insert set, but if a card company put the work into it, I think they could make them look more metal when they get the images to cardboard. I wouldn't mind having these in my collection, especially the Gaborik. Great job!

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    1. Thanks! I really hope when UD puts these out they do make them more "metal" kind of like the original set from 1996-97.

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