Featured custom card: 2010 Upper Deck 'Tribute to 90' Buster Posey #1

I've been dabbling with the idea of creating my own custom [or tribute] cards and while I'm a total newb, I hope to learn and gain some expertise - just to come up with unique images of trading cards, I'd never pull out of packs or find as singles anywhere, because they exist only in fantasy.

I didn't know how to really make these fantasy cards, though reading a tutorial on making your own baseball cards - inspired me to mess around on Photoshop and see what I can whip up on the fly.

I wanted create a Buster Posey card since he is probably going to be one of the top rookies in 2010, but he came up too late to have a 2009 MLBPA Rookie logo card produced - it is still a mystery, how any of the 2010 UD cards are going to look, especially if it is only licensed by the Players Association and not Major League Baseball.

For me, the most interesting aspect of custom/tribute cards is the ability to manipulate an original trading card design - it blew my mind to think custom/tribute cards using certain trading card designs were created by scratch.

With the most basic custom/tribute cards, all I really had to do was find an image/scan of a trading card - and change certain qualities on the original card, through an image editing program like Photoshop.

I can remove an original image on a trading card, but still retain the basic graphics as a template to layer onto a suitable image - before I do anything else, I have to make sure the image is proportional and not stretched.

It is kind of fun trying to cobble up something together - I'm not going to get every single thing right, but creating custom/tribute cards seems more fun than maybe simply consuming, purchasing, buying, picking up new cards.

The Posey 'card' is designed with the idea UD creates an insert set of 2010 rookies with the 1990 design and old school Star Rookie logo as a tribute [maybe as a potential 'Fat Pack' insert] - Posey's potential would definitely land him the No. 1 spot for 2010, if UD still had its Star Rookie subset after all these years.

Places of note -

Goose Joak

Custom Card Blog

Creating a Custom Retro Card