Trading Cards! (Sorry, not a droid)

[kresty]

I made some trading cards.  We'd been handing out business cards, but at Celebration were made to realize Trading Cards would be way betterer.  Of course I procrastinated too long, so these are printed on a laser printer and then cut on the laser cutter at work... 

Since I'm doing the cutting I didn't have to stay square so I toyed with hexagons - 2 1/2" still in case folks want to keep them with other trading cards.  One for BB-8 and one for MCK-Y (L3-G0 isn't going to London).  Notice the subtle rebel/imperial logos on the back - Imperial one might be a tad too hard to see, it seemed too dark on the computer and I wanted it readable.

But, of course, the main idea was to make a set of cards that looked like the original 1977 Topps trading cards, the hexes were a digression.  Here're my Topps look-alikes:

We wanted a "series" so it would be more fun, there are 9 for now.  Closer view of front & back:

It took me "forever" to clean up the art to something I was happy with.  I made the raster images I had into vectors, which was easier for some bits than others.

My blacks are blacker, particularly on the reverse where Topps used crappy paper.  I even sampled the texture of the paper so that I could try to have a little bit of grain in it.  Most visible in the tan border.  I'm pretty happy with them, they look reasonably "real", some others I've seen aren't as real-ish. 

A funny thing is I was going to "fix" the yellow corner under the wing of the x-wing.  I know the Topps had that error, even though it would have made sense to be yellow there.  But it looks like I forgot @ 3AM

Cutting on the laser was tricky too.  I eventually managed to get 4 sheets at a time in maybe a minute, but the edges are a little brown because of the higher power.  It took a long time to learn how to get there though.  It wanted to blow the cut bits away (it blows air to clean the cut area and keep it from burning).  It also took a bit to figure out how to do the registration more accurately. 

About 1/2 of them are really good.  The other half range from "ok" to "ick", mostly because the printer I'd tested on decided to use a different tray, and that tray was off by a lot - so the front and back were offset by 3/16" or so.

Anyway, I'm pleased with them.  I'll try to take better pix later.  I have a couple typos 'cause I was rushed, but they can be cleaned up for the next run.  Overall I'm surprised they turned out so realistic.  I'd thought they'd end up looking like a fan boy trying to make a fake Topps card, but I think they exceeded that.

Thanks to Jamie for inspiring me with his take on the Topps cards.