Black Phantom Chronicles Card Deck Behind the Scenes Part 11

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 the surface of the paper. If using acrylics and watercolors, which dry fairly quickly, progress can move along rather well.

This is not to say nothing happened that created annoyances and aggravations. There were times when my hands could not create what sat there in my head. Some days, I simply stared at the paper, or became too intimidated to make a single line in charcoal or paint. Sometimes, I loved the drawing when I finally finished it and trembled at the idea of ruining it with color.

When I scanned the paintings in and began editing the scanned files in the computer, new problems did arise, particularly with the king and queen. The original scan of the queen was so yellow, it was hideous. No scanner setting helped it, so I practically had to repaint her in Photoshop in order to restore the original painting’s appearance, section by section. When I was happy with the results, it still did not ever look like the painting, yet, it was good enough.

Now, I was never happy with the original painting of the king, period, no matter how many times I went over it in paint. The background looked good, Darkfire appeared to be a wood carving, and Evan was far from anything I would be happy with comparing to my story Prince Evan. Therefore, with the painting for the card deck kings, I took it into Photoshop and cut, moved, and clone-stamped new edges into many things until it looked much more like the image that had planted itself into my mind before I even set pencil to paper.

Those two were not finished with giving me grief, however, for after I sent the card deck to the printer for the alpha test, which two would print too dark? None other than the king and queen. The ace and jack looked wonderful as far as the printing went. The only problems with them were the borders, which I had to cut sections from in order to keep the image size large enough on the cards. The borders went from square to rectangle in two days of work, made longer by the fact that my file corrupted, and I had to reload my back-up file onto my computer and redo what I had just done.

Also, on the last two weeks of this semester, my computer completely fried itself. It is now, as a tech once said of my sister’s computer, “Toast”. Thankfully, after once losing an entire first draft of one of my stories, a total of 40,000 words, I have become a bit of a paranoid mess and I save all my work all over the house, literally all over, so that, just in case there is a break in, a burglar cannot steal all of my life-long work. Now, with my dead computer, it is just a matter of when I can actually work on anything, since I must share computers with at least two out of six family members, when email, online classes, homework, etc. etc. etc. fill up the other two computers.

The other down-side is that I have lost my entire Adobe suite. I do own a disk version of Photoshop, which I can program onto a new computer when I purchase it, but for now I do not even have that. Only Providence, I think, could explain the fact that I finished the project and had already sent the files to the printer when I lost everything.

In hind-sight, I don’t know of anything I really could have done any differently than what I did. I did alter things I had planned as I went along and found things for which I either did not have time or did not like, as in the suit symbols for the number cards, which made the cards appear crowded. The other things I changed, like the tuck-box, I changed due to expense and even future expense, since what is made here will be sold to future buyers and some profit must be considered.


All things considered, however, I went into the semester pre-planned, and came out content. Perhaps it would have been nice not to plan as much, if it meant I could pull off the same quality, and therefore be amazed at the result, but that is fantasy, which actually goes with the card deck anyway. Yes, this is fantasy, a card deck made partly by pre-planning, a bit of skill, an excessively large imagination, and what many would consider luck, fate, or even Providence, but what is undoubtedly beyond human understanding. For me as an artist, it is what determines the end result, whether I’ll look at the work after I am done and dislike it or, as with this project, look on it in its completion and see that vague shimmer of the wondrous imagination brought to life.