Jimmy Howard: 2020-21 O-Pee-Chee Error

Mistakes happen, that's just how world works sometimes. When it comes to sports cards, there are inevitably going to be some errors made on the manufacturer's side whether that be printing errors, quality issues or a number of other possibilities.

In the case of 2020-21 O-Pee-Chee card #448, the error was actually made upstream of the card manufacturer. It was on the photographer's end and unfortunately was not caught in time. The error in question: the photo used on Jimmy Howard's card is actually of his teammate Jonathan Bernier. Here's a look at the card in question. 

Its a nice looking card and I was really excited to see my main PC player was once again included in the O-Pee-Chee checklist. However, once the singles started hitting eBay I saw one of these and was immediately disappointed. The issue also carries over to the Retro parallel design, so all the possible variations of Howard's card feature Bernier.

I say disappointed because I was looking forward to chasing all these variations for my Howard collection, but now I do not plan on it since the player I'm actually collecting is on the card in name only. Some people might still chase these if it were their guy, and that's cool, but I'm not interested in these anymore.

The worst part is now that Howard has retired and never actually suited up for the 2020-21 season, this might be his last major release base card, at least for a while.

So where does that leave me? Well, since I've enjoyed making my own custom card designs for years now, I figured why not at least make myself a digital copy of this card with an actual photo of Jimmy Howard on the front? It is pretty easy cut and paste.

I'm definitely happy with how this one turned out. If only the actual card looked this nice. On a side note, it is really weird seeing Howard with those CCM pads and gloves. He wore Vaughn equipment almost his entire Red Wings career. They do look cool though.

Cardboard Creations: OPC Platinum

O-Pee-Chee Platinum parallels are one of my favorite parts of player collecting. Honestly I wish there were more of them every year, kind of like how Topps does their Chrome baseball set. I checked the list for 2020 and there are almost 20 different parallels for each card. While that may sound insane to some hockey collectors, I think it would be awesome. I've seen some almost complete rainbows of cards from this set and they look amazing.

Lately Upper Deck has generally done the same set of OPC Platinum parallels such as Red Prism, Orange Checkers and Blue Cubes. While those are great on their own, the more recent additions of the Sunset and Pond Hockey parallels are even better if you ask me. 

I like those two a bit more as they crop the player from the background image making it stand out better against the custom background. Since they only have these two though, I thought it would be fun to come up with some of my own custom designs.

The first one I'm calling the Lunar version as it's got an awesome image of the moon as the background. In my custom set of parallels this would be the 1/1 version.

Obviously these customs are based on the 2019-20 O-Pee-Chee Platinum design. I got my inspiration from the new Sunset parallel so this made perfect sense as a place to start. I took a scan from one of those and went to town re-creating it to the point where swapping the backgrounds was all that I needed to do for any additional design I wanted. 

As far as the re-creation process, I used my go-to design software: Inkscape, which I've used for every one of the custom card designs I've posted on here.

One of the more subtle features of that I wanted to capture in my version is the way the player is cropped to be layered behind the bottom portion of the card and layered above the top portion. That required a little extra work in the software, but was well worth it.

Once I had the basics in place and fine tuned to they way I liked, all I had to do was come up with additional backgrounds. That was probably the hardest part for me. After thinking of the Lunar idea a few more ideas popped into my head and I just went from there. 

Here are eight more designs to round out my first entire page:

Top Row: Lunar, Dragon Scale, Nebula
Middle Row: Matrix, Forest, Lava
Bottom Row: Amethyst, Steampunk, Tie-Dye

Even though the Lunar was my original idea, I think the Dragon Scale ended up being my favorite. It just stands out more than the others. I think something like that would look amazing printed on the OPC Platinum card stock.

Beyond that I just tried to come up with a nice variety of colors and textures. The Matrix one ended up looking pretty cool. And I know Upper Deck already has the Color Wheel version, but the Tie-Dye wound up looking so good I had to include it.

I wasn't completely sure the Steampunk design idea would work, but after some searching I found this image that worked pretty well with what I was trying to do. I'm not sure if anyone's ever done a steampunk themed parallel. The closest might be Metal Universe.

I've got several more ideas in the works, so I will hopefully be able to put together a second full page at some point. I'm open to any suggestions for new designs too. I just need a high quality image to work with and the rest is pretty quick work now.

One last thought on these: I think it would be really cool if Upper Deck held some kind of contest to come up with a new parallel design/background for an upcoming version of OPC Platinum. Maybe it doesn't need to be full on fan designs, but at least opening up the background selection to fan submissions/voting would be awesome.

Cardboard Creations: Bunch of Jerks

Hopefully the title gave this one away pretty quickly. I absolutely love what the Carolina Hurricanes have been doing with their Storm Surge celebrations after victories on home ice. I don't see what the problem is with a team trying to have some fun. 

Some people might not agree with that, but that's just how I feel. Same thing with the over the top pre-game shows that Vegas put on during last year's playoffs. I loved watching those and don't understand how so many people had such a huge problem with it.

Anyway, back to the reason for this post. Its been a while now since I came up with a custom hockey card design. My last two projects were music based. What better way to get back into this than with everybody's favorite bunch of jerks?

I wasn't really sure where to start with this one other than wanting some type of storm cloud background. Once I found that I kind of just winged it from there and after several iterations ended up with a design I was happy with. Before I talk about some of the details, here's a look at the first one of the seven I have so far.

I think these came out great, much better than I thought they would. The horizontal orientation was definitely the right way to go. I had played with the idea of a vertical design, but it never looked right so I scrapped that idea pretty quickly. 

Each card showcases one of the Hurricanes' Storm Surge celebrations. I tried to find a good quality photo so it was evident pretty quickly which celebration we're looking at. The first one was a bit tricky so I went with a great shot of the players getting the crowd going. This was just before they all skated toward the end boards and jumped into the glass. 

As far as the overall design, I wanted to incorporate the Bunch of Jerks text from the t-shirts as well as the Canes colors and logo.

I also added the Upper Deck logo just because it was easy to find and it gives the design a bit more realism, even if it is something that they would likely never make. I did the same fade effect as the Hurricanes logo to keep things consistent.

Each card also has a date on the bottom. This was just to give each card something that would be unique from the rest, other than the picture of course. I tried going with a full description similar to UD's recent game dated moments, but it just looked too crowded.

Up next we have a look at the second Storm Surge that took place on October 9th after the Hurricanes beat the Vancouver Canucks 5-3. This was similar to the first one as the players skated down the ice and jumped into the end boards. Here is a link to the video.

After their 3-1 win over the Flyers on New Year's Eve, rookie Andrei Svechnikov went for a nice long slide from center ice, through his teammates lined up on either side, and into the empty net. Here is a link to the video. Looks like fun, doesn't it?

Up next is one of my favorites. After a 4-2 win over the Blue Jackets, the players gathered in a circle at center ice with Brock McGinn in the center. McGinn does his best Thor impression and the rest of the team falls to the ice. Here is a link to the video.

This one is an example of when I had to settle for a picture of the aftermath rather than the core of the Storm Surge. After a 3-1 victory over the Oilers, Warren Foegele hits a walk-off home run and gets drenched with Gatorade by his teammates. Here is a link to the video.

It was also pretty neat when they did the limbo after beating the Stars 3-0 back on February 16th. Brett Pesce and Jaccob Slavin led the way using a stick as the limbo bar and everyone else got in on the action including the team's mascot. Here is a link to the video.

Last but not least is one of the more interesting Storm Surges. After a 5-2 win over the Blues the Hurricanes were joined on the ice by Evander Holyfield. Jordan Martinook was the lucky one who go to face off with the heavyweight champ. Here is a link to the video.

That's all for now. I'm working on some more of these and hopefully I'll be able to post an update later this season. There are a few more celebrations that I really enjoyed that would make for good cards. It will be interesting to see what happens if they make the playoffs. I've been rooting for them lately just because I want to see these in the playoffs.

Cardboard Creations: Country Stars

Between my recent Frontmen II custom set and stumbling across some Panini country music cards on eBay, I decided to go ahead and make myself a set of card featuring some of my favorite country artists. I've been into country music since I was a kid back in the 90's so this seemed like another fun way to work in some of my other interests here.

I used the same basic template as the Frontmen sets, but made some tweaks here and there. Considering these went from just an idea to a completed concept in less than a day, I'm pretty happy with the results. My favorite new feature for this set has to be the marquee lights that follow the borders on the top and bottom. 

I even worked in a little hockey with a new version of the Predators shoulder patch logo. I figured with it being a guitar pick and all, it would work perfectly here. I just changed the colors and the initials at the bottom are for the name of this set. The first one of this new set features my favorite new country artist Luke Combs.

The other really neat feature that I randomly added at the last minute is the faded silhouette of the Nashville skyline at the bottom. Since I was not using that area for a band logo this time, I needed to do something and this seem like a cool idea. 

Here are the rest of them together: 

I really like how these turned out. I have one other music themed set idea I'm working on so hopefully I'll be able to get that posted here sometime soon. I do in fact plan on posting about hockey cards again, I just really got into designing these things for the moment.

Cardboard Creations: Frontmen II

One of the things I really enjoyed back when I was blogging about cards more frequently was creating my own custom card designs. Even through the last few breaks I've taken from collecting, I was working on several custom sets. At this point its actually been more than four years since I last posted a custom design here on the blog. 

You might think I would jump back into this with a hockey set, but that is not the case as you can probably tell from the title of this post. It is in fact an update on the "Frontmen" set I posted all the way back in August of 2011. Click here to see that post for reference. Basically its a set featuring the lead singers from some of my favorite rock bands.

Since the focus of the set is the same as last time, I decided to keep the design relatively the same. I experimented with some radically different designs, but in the end settled on something that was similar to the first set, but not exactly the same.

As with most of my Cardboard Creations posts, I will show a larger version of a single card then all nine together. I chose to show this one of Rick DeJesus because his group Adelitas Way is by far my current favorite band. They've been putting out albums since 2011 and have a great overall sound as a modern hard rock band. Here's a look at the card:

I wanted to keep the same basic details as the first version, so I have the name of the set at the top along with the little singer silhouettes, the name below that, then the picture and the city name below that. At the bottom is the name and/or logo for the band. The biggest differences are the font and the background texture.

Here are the rest of them together:

While this isn't a hockey design, going through the process of finishing it combined with a look back at some of my other sets has me wanting to do more on the hockey side of things. Hopefully I will be able to put a few things together in the near future. I've already got some ideas, so we'll see what happens.

Metal Universe: What Could've Been...

Since Upper Deck did not include my favorite player in their recent Fleer Retro set, specifically the Metal Universe inserts, I thought I would take a few minutes and come up with my own. I will admit that I took a few shortcuts with this one, the main one being the image that I already had cropped from another custom set I did a while back. Otherwise I just reused the same template from the set of Metal Universe cards I posted in January.

Here's what I came up with:

If you remember the post I did with nine of these things, you will notice a few differences from that iteration to this one. I did those designs before the new Fleer Retro cards were released, so I just kind of threw something together when it came to the fonts. Here you will notice that I inverted the text colors to better match the real thing.

Another small change was switching the text on the year above "Metal" to read 2012 instead of the 2012-13 like in my previous design. For whatever reason, it just looks a little bit cleaner this way. Do you agree?

Have you ever had a set that you thought your player should've been included in? If so, have you ever gone ahead and designed your own card like this?

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.

Cardboard Creations: Need Some Advice

Recently I was asked by a fellow member of SCF (Sports Card Forum) about them printing some of my custom card designs, particularly my Fractal Mask designs. Apparently he knows a print shop that can produce decent quality printed hockey cards. My question for you guys is what should I do here? Have you been in this spot before?

I am definitely interested in seeing what my designs would look like on an actual piece of cardboard, but at the same time I do not want to worry about copyright infringement or any of that mess with all the pictures and logos I've "borrowed" for these designs. Have any of you that design and print custom cards had any issues with printing them?

The other thing is the guy offered to pay me for the designs, which I am really leaning against at this point, just to avoid any possible legal issues. Instead he threw out the option of printing me my own set for my efforts, which in my opinion is much cooler anyway.

Decisions, decisions....

That's only one of the dilemmas I'm facing with this whole situation. The other is the fact that I have no card back design for any of my custom sets, let alone the only one the guy wants to print. Just for a refresher, here's what the fronts of these cards look like:

Now for the backs, something I've never attempted to design before. It's got the obvious necessities like the card number and player info, but beyond that I had to kind of just wing it and this is what I came up with:

What do you guys think? 

I think for the sake of simplicity, I will keep the same fractal on the back of every card in the set, just to make it so I only have one back template file to deal with. Other than that, I'm open to any suggestions you guys have about the design. 

Cardboard Creations: Artifacts

Usually my custom set designs are one of two things: a straight up recreation of an existing set or a unique design of my own, even if some of them are inspired by other sets out there. The latest project is a bit of a hybrid. As you can tell by the title, this one has something to do with UD Artifacts, which has had some really nice designs.

It actually stared back in October of last year when I was playing around with a few custom set ideas and just happened to be looking at some of my UD Artifacts base cards. I thought to myself, why not try and make my own version of the set? Well, after a few design iterations and staying up til 2:00 am last night, I managed to come up with a set of nine.

Here's a closer look at the first of nine:

I wanted to have a background that would stand out and I think the blue fractal does just that, wouldn't you agree? After that I added the slight fading coming up from the bottom behind the player. Then it was onto the border, which was pieced together from a sample I found online. The position, name, and number bar was pretty simple, but I added the arch in the middle just to give it a little something extra.

Another thing I did that is pretty neat was having the borders of the card overlap the picture, giving it a nice clean look all the way around. I also added the Artifacts word mark to the top and a desaturated team logo to the bottom. The last piece was the picture, which I added a blur effect to, that's why they look a little out of focus from a distance.

Now, here's all nine of them together:

You may be wondering about the choice of goalies here. The reason I chose the group that I did was just to make things easier. I found a Photobucket account that has a bunch of cropped player images, so I just picked through the different teams and found the most usable goalie pics, and this is what I ended up with. 

I wish I could've found a pre-cropped picture of Jimmy Howard for this set, but oh well, I'll have to save that for another project. I think my favorite would have to be the Miller. It was the first one I was working on and served as the template for the rest of them. 

What do you guys think? Any comments or criticisms are greatly appreciated.

Cardboard Creations: Jericho

I haven't come up with any custom card designs for a little while now, mostly because I never have time to work on them, but partly because I didn't have any new and exciting ideas to work with. Well, that changed when I stumbled across my new favorite TV show, Jericho, a few months back while browsing Netflix during my Christmas vacation. 

Here's a quick summary of what the show is all about from IMDB: "After a series of terrorist attacks leave the US in a state of disaster. A small Kansas town must come together to deal with a new reality." I highly recommend that you check it out.

Now for the custom cards I came up with. I should mention that there is a trading card set already out there from the first season of the show and I kind of used that for inspiration in getting started with my initial concept design. Beyond that I just threw together some ideas and it eventually turned into what I have here.

Here's a close-up look at the first card featuring Skeet Ulrich as Jake Green:

Since Jericho is a post-apocalyptic kind of show, I wanted to start with a grungy looking background and that's what I used as the base layer. While I was searching for that, I came across the caution tape looking wallpaper and decided to try and work that in somehow. As you can see, I used it behind the character/actor names as well as the thumbnail image bar across the bottom of each card. 

The idea with that was to contrast the studio-quality head shots with some live action shots taken directly from some of the episodes. It came out looking better than I thought it would. Other than that, I made an editable copy of the Jericho word-mark and placed it in the upper left corner to complete the design.

I ended up creating nine of these to have one complete page. Here they are together:

What do you guys think? I know it's not the usual here, but I wanted to try something different and work in another one of my interests, other than hockey of course. By the way, have any of you watched, or even heard of Jericho? If not, check it out.

Cardboard Creations: Clear for Takeoff

Seeing the latest custom design over at My Hockey Card Obsession, which is pretty impressive I might add, is what motivated me to finish the latest custom set idea I've been working on and finally share it with everyone. This is another one of those ideas that just came out of nowhere and I just started throwing things together and what you see below is the final result of a few different iterations and a few hours work.

Here's the first card in the set, featuring Valtteri Filppula of the Detroit Red Wings: 

While this one wasn't the inspiration for the set idea, it ended up being the best picture and my favorite of the bunch. As you can see, these cards deal with pictures in which the players are airborne, whether that means they are scoring, taking a shot, or just avoiding an opponent. Also, if you don't know, the picture above was taken as Filppula beat Marc-Andre Fleury in game two of the 2008 Stanley Cup Finals. 

As far as the name, Clear for Takeoff, it just kind of popped in my head and I stuck with it. Now I know it's not that original, but sometimes things just work the way they are and I think that's the case here. Or should I have gone with Cleared for Takeoff, oh well, who knows? It is what it is now.

Anyway, here are all nine of them together:

Beyond the Filppula, the Colby Armstrong has to be my next favorite, and that's the one that was actually the inspiration for the entire set. As far as how that goes, well I came across a Puck Daddy article on the top hockey hugs and some of them featured players leaping into the air. Well, at first I thought I would do that for the set, but then I came across the Armstrong pic and changed my mind to what you see here. 

After a little searching for a generic airport runway/takeoff pic and the clipart pilot's wings, I threw everything together and came up with the basic design you see here. I played around a bit with different fonts, but ended up settling on the one you see, called "Bigmacca" from Dafont.com. I though it went well with the whole airplane theme.

The five stars were the last thing I added as I felt the name bar just needed a little something extra, and they fit the bill perfectly. The only other thing I made sure to do was include a nice full color team logo on each card, and the circle in the center of the pilot's wings worked out just right for that.

So what do you guys think? I was going for something that was a bit different and I think I accomplished that, wouldn't you say? 

Cardboard Creations: Last Line of Defense Part IV

It's been a few days now since I've been able to share another set of these. This one's been sitting in the queue and I don't have anything else to post at the moment so it works. This set's got a nice mix, especially considering there are several types of mask styles represented and even two guys who went mask-less.

 

This will be the first set in which I've never seen any of the goalies actually play for the Wings. Reindeau would be the closest, but I didn't get into hockey until a few years after he moved on from Detroit. 

It's getting to the point where it's even harder to find quality images for this set. It's even gotten as bad as taking a screen capture from a video in some cases. 

It might be a while before I post another set of these as I don't have any pictures waiting to be used and I have a lot of projects to update in the next little while.

Project Status

Number of Former Wings Goalies Completed: 36
Number of Former Wings Goalies Remaining: 43

Cardboard Creations: Last Line of Defense Part 3

One thing I'm learning about really quickly with this set, other than the history of Red Wings goaltending, is the fact that there are not a ton of usable pictures for a lot of these guys. Some only played a few games, others only one. Luckily, I've been able to continue using The Goalies Archive, but soon I'm going to run into some issues with a lot of the old timers.

Right now that doesn't matter, I'll figure out something when it comes time for all of the real old timers in this set. That said, I've got the next nine ready to go.

Once again, I would like to thank people for their suggestions for this growing set:

• bamlinden (Edwards)
• JGBlargh (Stefan and Maracle)
• Sal (Millen)

As far as modern goaltenders go, that was pretty much all I had to work with, so I just filled in the remaining five spots of this page with a few picks of my own. Take a look. 

As you can see, there's a nice mix of goalies here. I've got some from the 70's, 80's, 90's, and 00's. It's kind of funny that the first two are both righties named Greg. There's four of them all together, seems like there were a lot more right-handed catchers back in the day. I wonder if there's any reason for that...

Anyway, of this group, I was only able to watch Maracle, Wregget, and Lamothe. Maracle served as the third goaltender during the 1997-98 season and became Osgood's backup in 1998-99, after which he was claimed by Atalanta in the expansion draft, 2nd overall I might add. Wregget was signed as a free agent in 1999 and only spent one season with the Wings. Finally, Lamothe was the Wings fourth goaltender in 2003-04, but managed to make two appearances after Hasek and Joseph both went down with injuries. Man is it weird to think of those two as your goaltending duo, albeit for parts of one season, isn't it?

That's it for now. What do you guys think, should I keep this thing going? If so, I would like some more suggestions for the next set of nine, even if the choices are becoming more and more limited.

Project Status

Number of Former Wings Goalies Completed: 27
Number of Former Wings Goalies Remaining: 52

Cardboard Creations: Last Line of Defense Part II

This set is quickly becoming one of my favorites of what I've done so far, as it provides a good look into the history of the team I grew up loving and still do to this day. Last time around I asked you guys for some suggestions and now it's time for my end of the deal.

First, I'd like to thank the following people for their suggestions:

• Dirty Dangle (Vernon)
• Captain Canuck (Sauve, Low, and Rutherford)
• Sal (Chevrier and St. Laurent)
• Brad (Hodson)

I should mention there were a few others I wasn't able to get to as by the time I read them I already had a few designs completed (in this case the Essensa and Hanlon). So without further ado, here are the next nine cards in my 'Last Line of Defense' set:

Out of this group, the only two I was ever able to watch were Vernon and Hodson. Other than that, I just have a few cards of guys like Hanlon and Essensa in my collection. The rest are, well, just part of history to me.

So what do you guys think, how did this round turn out?

Project Status

Number of Former Wings Goalies Completed: 18
Number of Former Wings Goalies Remaining: 61

Cardboard Creations: 66-67 Parkhurst

When it comes to custom card designs, the easiest thing to do is take an existing design and either completely recreate it or use it as a starting point and change it up a bit. This edition of Cardboard Creations would be the latter. If you don't know, this set is based on the Parkhurst design from 1966-67. 

I wanted to do something a bit older than 1997 this time around so I figured I'd fire up the Delorean and go all the way back to the 60's. Not as far as my 54-55 Topps creations, but close enough. As usual, here's a closer look at the Howard I came up with. 

Here are some of the originals: 

 

At first glance these look pretty much like the originals, but if you take close look and compare the two, mine have a couple of differences. The biggest thing was layering the pictures behind the left-side team color borders, where the originals are on top. Other than that, I decided not to tint the background, leaving them a neutral grey color. 

Here's a look at the rest of them together: 

One thing you may notice is that I actually stuck with nothing but Original Six teams this time around. That just made sense for some reason, as you can never go wrong with any of these teams.

So what do you guys think, how do they look? 

By the way, I've taken some of you suggestions on my 'Last Line of Defense' set and worked up another set of nine cards, looks for those in the next few days.

Cardboard Creations: Last Line of Defense

Lately my custom card sets have featured current goaltenders, mainly because I like to keep things consistent and it's a lot easier to find current photos these days. That said, this set is a bit different. It's called 'Last Line of Defense' which I know isn't all that original, but it works, and it will feature both past and present goaltenders.

Now, as you probably know I'm a Red Wings fan and I love goalies. Well, this set is all about those two things. After reading Michael's last goalie project post over at Collecting for Kicks, I thought it would be neat to do something similar with the Wings. Then I thought about it for a second, and that would pretty much be impossible, so I decided I wanted to just create my own cards, especially for some of the old timers.

This first one is an example of a guy whose RC would be pretty hard to come by, at least for me. As far as the design, I started with the vertical card template, added the circular cutout, and kind of just ran with it from there. The shield logo in the middle is something I happen to stumble upon and I thought it would look good and kind of go along with the whole last line of defense idea.

The background is just a generic fractal I found on Google. Beyond that I added the corner elements just to break up the background a little bit. You may also notice the font looks familiar, that's because it's the same one I used on my recent 'Frontmen' custom set.

The one thing I did want to do was add the years in which each goaltender played with the Wings. For some this will be just a year and others it will be two or three stints kind of like Terry Sawchuk or Dominik Hasek.

Obviously Detroit being an Original Six team means they have had a ton of goaltenders over the years. According to The Goalies Archive, the Red Wings have had 84 different goaltenders between 1932 and 2011. That's including the current group of Howard, McCollum, Conklin, and MacDonald though, so my set will probably consist of the 79 former goaltenders, everyone from Sawchuk to Osgood.

Here are the first nine of them together:

As you can see, I've got a variety of goaltending eras from Detroit's history represented here. I've got every decade since the 40's covered in this group. Since I'm only 22 though, I've only had the pleasure of seeing five of these guys actually play (Legace, Joseph, Hasek, Ranford, and Osgood). I know of the rest, I just never had the chance to see them play.

Now that I've got the design down, I'm working on the next group of nine. The hardest part is finding quality images for some of the older goaltenders, especially the ones that only played a handful of games for the Wings.

So what do you guys think? Any suggestions for goalies I should include in the next nine?

Cardboard Creations: Frontmen

Just from the title of this post, something might seem a little off. That's because this one has nothing to do with hockey, well almost nothing. If I had to choose my second passion beyond hockey, it would be music. I love all kind of music, but I'm particularly fond of modern rock, and what doesn't go better with hockey than some good hard rock music?

That said, I thought it would be cool to create a custom card set featuring the lead singers of some of my favorite rock bands, hence the set name 'Frontmen.' Plus, it's Friday, so I though why not change things up a bit for once?

Here's a look at one of the 'Frontmen' cards I came up with:

The overall design is pretty simple. Aside from the obvious task of identifying who the card features, there were a few other things I was looking to do. First, I wanted to have a nice large color picture right in the middle, check. Next I wanted to somehow work in the little singer silhouette, check. Lastly, I wanted to use actual logos/artwork from each band, rather than simply using plain old text for the band names, check.

You may also notice I included the name of a city on the front of the card as well. That city would be the one in which the band was formed, and I thought it would be neat to include that as part of the design.

Here are the rest of them together:

A few of the band have some ties to the game of hockey. First off, my favorite band, Dry Cell, was the feature artist on the commemorative DVD put together by Warner Brothers for the Red Wings 2002 Stanley Cup Championship.  Also, Chad Kroeger of Nickeback is a known Wings fan and has been spotted at Joe Louis Arena during recent playoff runs.

Not really sure if the other bands have ties to the game, but they all play great rock music and like I said earlier, what's better to go with hockey than some good hard rock?

As far as getting this set done, from concept to finished product, this set took me less than a day, which is probably the fastest I've ever come up with a nine-card custom set to date. I was just playing around with a design in Inkscape and somehow it just came together the way it did. The hardest part was probably finding just the right picture for each card followed by finding useable logos/word art for the bottom of each card. 

So there you have it, a little insight into something else I'm into other than hockey cards. What do you guys think? Do any of you share the same musical interests as me?

Cardboard Creations: Fractal Masks Part II

Michael's mask design contest over at Collecting for Kicks got me thinking that I haven't done any mask related customs lately. It's been quite a while now since I rolled out the first nine cards in my latest goalie mask themed custom set, so I thought I was overdue for another installment of Fractal Masks.

I've been sitting on six completed designs for the last two months, so I just decided to power my way through the last three in about two hours to get another complete nine-card page. I've got the process pretty well honed in at this point, it's just a matter of finding the time.

This time around, all of the masks are painted by David Gunnarsson and can be found in his mask gallery. It's hard to find a better source for usable mask pics like these on the web. I do miss some of the cooler masks this way though, but that's alright as Gunnarsson's page showcases masks from around the world, and not just the NHL.

Here's a look at my favorite from this group:

How can you not love this mask? I'm pretty sure it's my new favorite mask in general, I mean come on it's got Homer Simpson on it. How cool is that? In case you're wondering, this mask was created for Thomas Halasz of HC Kosice in Slovakia. Check it out here.

Here's a look at all nine of them together:

As you can see, I tried to get a nice mix of masks from both the NHL and other leagues. This time around I've got two from the AHL, five from the NHL, and two from Europe. Other than the Halasz, my favorite would be a toss up between Valiquette's Spidey mask and Smith's Milwaukee Admirals mask. 

With this set, I've also continued using a different 'fractal' with each design. I think doing this makes each one kind of unique, plus it makes for a really cool looking nine-card page when it's all said and done.

So what do you guys think? Which one is your favorite?

Cardboard Creations: 97-98 Score

Lately I've been wanting to do another custom card set, but never really got around to starting anything, until yesterday. Instead of working on my second page of 'Fractal Mask' cards, I thought I would change things up and do another recreation set. 

This time around the set I recreated is a bit newer compared to the others I've done in the past. As the title says, this time I used the 97-98 Score as the basis for my design. I got the idea after looking at my TTM successes and realizing quite a few came from this set. 

Brett over at My Hockey Card Obsession put together an excellent look at this set back in October of 2009 as part of his 'One Sheet, One Set' project. Head over there to check it out and get a good idea of what the original set design looks like. 

Looking at the design, it's made up of primarily simple geometric elements, so I thought it would be a quick project. Here's a look at the first one I came up with, which took maybe an hour including time to find and install a font that matched the vertical player name text. 

These came out much better than I thought they would. The hardest part was figuring out a way to consistently match the glowing font for the player's last name. Other than that, it was as simple as tracing the various geometric shapes, layering them properly, and assembling them into the finished product. 

Here are all nine of them together:

If you're wondering why I chose the player selection I did, it's because I wanted to get as many different team colors represented as I could within the nine card limit.

My favorite of the bunch is definitely the Howard, as it's got an excellent closeup of his best mask to date. Beyond that, I tried to get a variety of pictures (i.e. Thomas hoisting the Cup and Halak stepping onto the ice). I wanted something more than simple action shots. 

What do you guys think, did they turn out ok? 

Cardboard Creations: Fractal Masks

It's been almost four months since I've been able to share any of my custom card designs, and almost a year since my Masked Men custom set. I think you can see from the title why that's significant.

I love goalie masks and my Masked Men set was an attempt to showcase some of the cooler masks over the years in the NHL.

That being said, since I finished that set I've wanted to do more custom goalie mask cards. That's where the idea for my new custom set, Fractal Masks, comes from.

The biggest difference between Masked Men and Fractal Masks is the focus placed on the masks themselves. With this set, I decided to crop out the masks, kind of like the old Pinnacle and BAP Mask cards.

As far as the fractal part of the name, that's what I used for the background of each card. However, unlike the Pinnacle and BAP cards, I wanted to find a fractal that worked with each mask, rather than have the same generic background for all of the cards.

Fractals come in all kinds of shapes and colors, so they work perfect for this kind of project. Most of the ones from this set from Caedes, a site I've been using for years to get desktop backgrounds.

Here's a look at my favorite of the first nine:

The first thing you might notice that's different than other Masks sets is the inclusion of the goalie's name and the logo of the team with which the mask was worn. 

This particular mask, worn by former NHL goaltender Scott Langkow with the Krefeld Pinguine of the DEL, features a theme from one of my all-time favorite movies, Transformers. I love the use of the Bumblebee Camaro and nothing beats the Autobot logo. 

Now, here's the first nine together: 

 

As you can see, there's a nice mix of old and new masks here. If you look close, you can see that the Miller and Tellqvist are the only two that include the straps. This is because those are the only two I cropped from actual photos of the masks in action. 

The straps are absent from the others because they all came from well-known mask artist David Gunnarsson's website, where he has a nice photo gallery of each mask before the straps are added. 

Beyond Langkow's Transformers mask, it's hard to pick a favorite from this group. How cool is Lehtonen's Chuck Norris mask, or Ellis' new zombie duck mask? They're all awesome. 

I'm definitely glad I chose to use a different fractal background for each mask, as it gives the set a bit of variety and color when you put a bunch of them together like this. 

Now that I've seen these first nine together, I plan on making more, maybe not as many as the Masked Men set, as these take a bit more work. I also plan on including more masks from the European and minor North American leagues, like the Langkow, because awesome mask art is not limited to just the NHL.

So what do you guys think? Are these an upgrade over my Masked Men customs from last year? Have any design suggestions or mask recommendations?