Esther Wallace

December 15, 2016  The End of the Beginning Despite unrealistic plans before I started this semester, I feel that I have finished this card deck well. I have a professional looking playing card deck that I am comfortable selling and I had enough fun during the process that I am contemplating making other card decks to sell on the Etsy shop I and my sister have set up, WallaceOfAllTrades . The professionalism has only happened due to lots of pre-planning and self-appraisal. I prepared well enough that difficulties were rare. Now, that wasn’t all because of my planning. Painting is not ruled by a computer chip or clicking codes beneath the surface. All in all, it’s very straight forward. Brushes, paper, acrylics, watercolors, and the like do not possess glitches, freeze suddenly, or corrupt. On thick paper, capable of holding a certain amount of water, one draws an image to their satisfaction, dips their brush in the appropriate colored paint, and draws that paint along t...

December 12, 2016 Beta Test Results I was much more pleased with this critique than with the Alpha Tests’ critique. Having more people with many different opinions is so very helpful, and although various opinions must always be taken with a grain of salt, everything everyone says is at least worth thinking about. For instance, it was suggested to me by several people that I should duplicate the numbers and flip them opposite directions so that the card is face up either way. I am not going to do this because one of the problems I had originally is that the cards were over crowded. If I do as suggested, the number cards will go back to their state of having too much on them. Other than that, I am taking the suggestions that were made in class about the breaks in a few of the numbers and the random dots. I am cleaning up the edges and fixing the lines in Photoshop. Of the smallness of the text, I am deleting the quotes and just moving the characters’ names to the quotes places...

December 5, 2016 Beta Test Reviews Jeffrey Chen: The art was amazing, it felt like a real deck of playing cards in my hands. The only things I saw were a few inconsistencies in the numbers in the center of the cards where some of the numbers cut off from each other. John MacLeod: I was extremely impressed that you already had physical examples of the cards to pass around. The borders looked very nice, and having a new one for every suit was really cool. The artwork looked like it was from an old story-book or something. For the negatives, I think it might be tough to tell a suit at first glance without knowing where to look. The numbers are dead center too, making holding them a little weird. A number on the top left might help a bit for that. The cards are also harder to read when not rightside-up. All that said, I would love to play a game of solitaire with these. Stephani Flanigan: I feel that the best way to maybe fix the number bit that John mentioned could be to push...

November 14,  2016 Forced Alterations to Plans Since last week, I have had several more people look at my project. Overall, I think I am content with the work. I am now in the phase of wrapping up, adding minute details, trying to make sure it prints in high quality, and that everything is clear and legible. It means a lot of tedious work, and going back in to change back what was just changed. That said, the largest alteration to my plans is in the box and booklet area. As I continue to contemplate pricing, I realize that anything added to the deck will make the end result too expensive for future buyers and that the best thing to do is to purchase it at its shrink-wrapped default price. This changes more in my proposal than in my timeline, although there was a week I was going to design a box and now, I am not going to, because it is my opinion that anything over 20 dollars is too expensive a price for any card deck. At first, I considered designing a booklet instead, wh...

November 7, 2016 A Time in Man’s Life There comes a time in man’s life… Aside from that saying, though it may not be man’s life, there does come a time in any artist’s work, when he or she needs another pair of eyes. The artist himself or herself has spent hours staring at the same piece of art and has completed it to the best of possessed abilities. It is not that no flaws are apparent, but the artist has no idea how to proceed in order to make the work better. In these times, someone else should give some input. All this is to say, I am at that point. I have arranged my cards to the best of my abilities, and most of the people I ask tell me the simple answer; they like it. This cannot be. I myself can see things that could be either better or different, but I am too close to it to see what needs that slight tweak to make it go from good to outstanding. There is no avoiding this time of need, at least to my knowledge, outside of owning an outrageous ego. As I previously sai...

October 31, 2016 Alpha Test Results I can’t really complain with the Alpha test review, except that I disagree. I wished to know if the colors blended into each other too much, if the fantasy feel was strong enough, if the quotes should be darkened to black, if there should be a stroke around the frames or not, and if some of the symbols should be smaller, larger, have more space between them, if their colors do not work with the red and black symbol at all, so forth and so on. I have my own opinion on some of this, but I wished to hear other people’s views. At this point, I need other eyes to help bring this card deck to complete professionalism. I love to hear that it was good, but I do not really care to hear it right now unless it comes with some idea of how it could be better. Whether I agree or not is up to my vision, but I am begging others to rip it apart. Please, rip it apart, especially if you love it, for love will wish for greatness.

October 26, 2016 Update, Update, Update If I followed the timeline once, I have nearly discarded it now, except for important deadlines. First, I fell behind and, in catching up, I briefly shot ahead. In order to stay on schedule later, when I became stuck on one design, I picked something out of another week and worked from there. I suppose I am on schedule, but completely out of the order I had originally chosen. On the plus side, I only have three more symbols to paint before I am done with the painting stage. After that, I have all the computer and nit-picking work. That alone will take hours, and it will also take many, many eyes and opinions. Hopefully, there will be many volunteers and even picky people. Although their advice must be taken with more grains of salt, they often give one more things on which to think and that contemplation can open doors

October 24, 2016 Challenges of Yesterday and Tomorrow Of the challenges I've faced, the largest would be in the planning. Sometimes, my mind seems incapable of planning anything as it wanders of its own accord and, sometimes, I discover that the plans I made cannot work and I must start over. This was especially true when I was trying to think of an idea for a project. It is true, I had the entire summer to plan, and I used it. All right, I began in earnest ever since sitting through DAT 290 while I was in DAT 215 last spring. I considered making an author/artist website from scratch, yet after DAT 215, I did not feel that was as necessary to myself as it had been before, and I also realized that I might never make it through the project considering all the things that could go wrong. At least, I could not finish it with the professional quality I wanted. Although I was interested in making a self-made leather-bound book with illustrations, I knew from the beginni...