Custom cards and bubbles - how to?

I have searched on our wiki, but I can't find much about it. How do I do it? Where do I get the material?

For the card art....Adobe Photoshop and lots of patience, time and effort. The bubbles I believe you can get from 334th Joe Company.

For the card art....Adobe Photoshop and lots of patience, time and effort. The bubbles I believe you can get from 334th Joe Company.

I don't think he's allowed to sell those anymore. He got a C & D order from Hasbro for all the ones he made. And said Hasbro was just jealous cause he was giving them to people who wanted them......though didn't know GIVING meant charging a arm and a leg for them. He did say he has made subtle hints about how to's in all his posts on the STank over there.

Good question. I've made one, working on another right now.

Here is my process so far

1. I got a good scan of the blank canadian cardback from raptor
• cleaned it up in photoshop to fix where the card bubble used to be

2. Redraw all of the logos, text, etc in Adobe Illustrator

3. Place cardback character image

4. Print
• each side on premium photopaper for weight
• spray mount together

5. Cut out the cardback

If wanting to do 25th chromed cardback, well that is a different story.

I do graphic design at work, so this is probably overkill

for bubbles, I cheat and make mine openable using storage cases like these

Soulgem,

Over on the Tri-State Viper boards we have a thread about Dutch_Redneck who put together a how-to on creating custom cards and attaching blister bubbles.

Here is the link to the thread:

http://www.tristatevipers.com/viewtopic.php?t=1430

Hope it helps! Keep us posted on your progress.


P.S. If the JC mods want to include it in the wiki here, am sure DR wouldn't mind.

Here is the link to my site, I have a copy of it.
http://www.pimpmyjoe.com/howto/customcards.pdf

Thanks for lots of great stuff guys.

I've started making a custom of a friend as a gift.

Thats a great how-to, Dutch really does nice work.

Although not a G.I. Joe site, i used FFURG.com back in the day to learn how to do packaging. It has quite abit of information about making cardbacks. Here's a link to their packaging info page.

http://www.ffurg.com/articles/packaging.htm

One additional suggestion I would add that helps with rounding out the corners of the cardbacks, is that you can buy a corner rounder that makes really nice clean rounded corners in difference sized radius's. Here is a pic of a corner rounder similar to the one that I use for my cardbacks.