Dream Girl Kathy Ireland

This custom card is probably long overdue.  I've made a few of these "Dream Girl" cards from a 1991 Score baseball "Dream Team" inspired design.  When you're talking about dream girls for Gen X'ers, Kathy has to be on the shortest of shortlists.  Hopefully, this card makes up for her absence to date.

John Goodman

This image is a pretty internet famous image, but it's usually the photoshopped version of it where John is wearing a Black Flag band shirt.  I figured the original image where Goodman is wearing a shirt of his beloved LSU Fighting Tigers would make for a pretty fun card because who isn't a John Goodman fan?  He's been a lot of great stuff which includes several sports-themed roles.

I'm not 100% sure what year the image was taken but I'm fairly sure it's from the '80s.  Usually, I'm a stickler researching so I can match the year to the card design but I knew from the outset that I only wanted to put the image in a 1984 Topps football inspired design.  It's the only football design from the 80's that incorporates a logo (not counting the on-helmet logos '82 & '88 designs), and I really wanted to use the logo LSU used as their primary logo throughout the 1980s.  That logo, to me, looks so generic and dated, therefore it has the type of charm I dig.

I've used the '84 design quite a few times in the past but this is the first time I added a card back.  I was unfamiliar with the back of these cards.  I had to check several sources to make sure I was indeed looking at the back of the right cards because it looks so dated, even more so than 1984.  It looks more like it would befit a football card from the 1970s, or even older.

1984 Topps football 

Joe Dirt

Joe Dirt is one of those late '90s / early '00s comedies that I didn't realize how much I liked.  Also, I never remember taking note of what a good message the movie has --while being cloaked in lowbrow humor.

If you've read this blog in the past you might remember that my affinity for trading card design, for the most part, comes to a halt in the early '90s.  Joe Dirt came out in 2001 and I have no idea what trading cards looked like by then.  I know they were shinier with foil stamping, but that's about all I know.  So I had to choose a vintage-inspired design that I thought would be a good fit for the movie. 

In looking at the movie's poster I noticed the Joe Dirt type logo has something of an orange gradient fade coloring which made me think of the 1988 Topps football design with its gradient color fades that coordinated with the different NFL teams.  I chose to color the frame the same as that movie poster font logo.  I did that for the 6 character cards in the mini-set and then made 3 "Classic Scene" cards with a blue gradient fade coloring to set them apart as a subset.

1988 Topps football

The card backs are inspired by the '88 Topps football card backs, but not a 1:1 match.  I freestyled a bit to pack as much into the back of these cards as possible. 



I also did an additional David Spade card as a bonus card to the set. 

Snake Plissken

This card is based on the basketball scene from John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. (1996) starring Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken.

This particular card drove me a bit mad.  I like the way it turned out overall, but I didn't get to do *exactly* what I wanted to do.  I didn't get to add the Skybox signature basketball motion trail.  The quality of the image wasn't the greatest for starters.  The positioning of the ball didn't make the most sense and the trail also made the card look a bit crowded.  I wasn't as discouraged after seeing that at least the James Worthy card in the set just has the glowing ball without a trail.  Fortunately, I didn't have this problem with the first card I did using the 1990-91 Skybox inspired design because there wasn't a basketball present in the image. But, like I said, overall I feel it's a pretty cool card.

1990-91 Skybox