Oh Fudge!

Picture Courtesy of Kraft

I just wasted the better part of an hour trying to do something I didn't want to do for the sake of someone else.

I've basically got one day left of my personal challenge to get four items done and onto DriveThruRPG.com.  I've got two finished and most of a third, but the forth isn't going to happen and I'm not going to even try to accomplish it....for good reason.


I got my 1st and second items done no problem, but when I went to start working on the third I discovered that someone, someone whose work I enjoy, just did a similar project, and in many ways did it better than I was going to do it.  I only have one criticism for the other guy's work and it is a minor one.  I just cannot see replicating his effort unless I can improve upon the idea.  Even then, it would be disrespectful to even try.

Original Card Back

So now my focus is just going to be getting the 4th project moved up an finished in place of the third planned project.  My second project, a deck of playing cards, in less than a week has proved more popular than just about everything else I've done to date.  I sure the fact I put it up for free didn't hurt much either.  The only criticisms I've really had so far was that the cards were in black & white, which should soon bring me back full circle here.

Colored Card Back

I spent the better part of an hour and a half (or so, I wasn't keep track) trying to color in the cards I had made already, just for those that wanted them in color.  I hated my effort so far and think I need to scrap it altogether.  The idea behind the cards were that they were made with simple woodcut illustrations.  I based them off of some old public domain images from hundreds of years ago....some of which were definitely woodcuts.  I only envisioned these cards in black & white....well, actually black only on some appropriate colored cardstock.  In my mind's eye, coloring would have to be rather simple, or otherwise these cards would have simply been painted to begin with and have a completely different look.  I made a simple pallet of eight colors and used just those to color a couple of cards, starting with the card back.  I could try to blend two colors from the limited pallet for some variation, but I still didn't care for the results.

At this point I can only see going forward if I did something like print the cards out really large (I have them all as Adobe Illustrator files) and do some sort of watercolor to just the special cards and the card back.  Then I could scan everything and try again, but I don't know if it is worth the effort.  I want a limited and muted color pallet and I don't think the colors should be "clean".  In the end I could spend days on this and the few folks that really seemed to want colored cards might not be happy with the results anyway.  I don't expect coloring would work for a lot of cards anyway....

7 of Bows, Shields, Spears, and Swords

If I went through all this extra work then the cards definitely wouldn't be free anymore.  I could spend a couple days on this and then get maybe $3 out of the effort, not even enough to recoup my supplies.