Card collages and how to best enjoy your PC
 

Hey All. In between pining for new additions to the collection, I try to "enjoy" the cards I have by creating visually appealing collages of my scans. I use freeware called GIMP to do this but I think there are many approaches. In any case, here's an example I thought I would share of my Topps Banks Run:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...bea2c22f_c.jpgBanksRun

What kinds of activities do other people recommend to stave out the desire to just keep adding cards by better enjoying the ones you already have?

Nice collection and collage, Mathew.

Might have to give GIMP a try myself.

Thanks. :)

It takes a little bit of time to learn to use it well, but there are plenty of helpful guides online. The fact that it's very powerful and free makes up for the learning curve :).

Amazing Banks collection!! I can tell u took great care in choosing these cards!!

My advice, log off eBay and take a month to enjoy your accomplishments!!!

I do this frequently but not with scans. I keep a small collection that I can take out when I want and display on my coffee table. I sometimes base my next purchase on what will look good next to another card I already have. I’ve also sold cards that I didn’t like how they looked with my others.

I really like how you have the Banks' cards displayed. I downloaded GIMP. My learning curve is going to be a long one, but I've always wanted to learn photo stuff. Beautiful collection of Ernie cards.

Great Banks run. I started putting my collection on Flickr a week ago and it's been a lot of fun. It's free you can download 1000 images, different albums, easy to use and you can rearrange the images however you want.

Yeah, I really like using it to check out my collection whenever I feel like it!


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Thanks! Let me know if you need any pointers and I can help.


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I’ve said it before, but your run of Banks cards is just unreal. Oozing eye appeal all the way through.

Well done!

What are those? I’ve never seen them before and they look fantastic!


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1974 Laughlin Old Time Black Stars. One of the first NL tribute sets. Still has the 'RCs' of some HOFers.

Added to the search! Those are very nice cards of a lot of amazing guys who don’t have many cards.


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There is also a follow-up 1975 set.

Firstly, shame on you, OP, for disrupting my New Years resolution to get at least a certain good amount of sleep per night, which I only just recently had started succeeding at regularly.

Secondly, take a look at what you inspired me to create as an entry to the thread:



Notes:
-it's basically the Clemente full regular-issue run, grouped by year, read L-->R in rows so as to tell the story of his career

-the larger gap before the '73 is meant to symbolize the emptiness left by his passing and that the card itself published afterward

-the '63 Fleer is thrown in, as well as some topical cards that are not technically player cards but fill out the team story (like the team cards, and playoff specials)

-one oddball/insert added for fun

-only one left out: the '67 checklist, the busy text of which takes too much away from the whole IMO on this project

-also, one is OPC since that scan happened to be much more straight in its holder than my Topps copy so it looked better

-these are all graded since that's a choice I made some time ago, but I cropped off the label ends because IMO the PSA ones in particular are unattractive and the exceedingly red boarder distracts from cards themselves; this view also approximates a top loader look, which I like the nostalgia of for how I used to collect

-I played with the program enough to produce this, but it's just a first take; I just eye-balled all the spacing and such, but I am sure there must be settings to perfectly center rows and columns in relation to each other if someone digs in deeper

Haha! Sorry about your loss of sleep but you made such a nice collage. This is great! I’ve thought about cropping my slabs out too to focus on the cards, so that was a nice touch. In GIMP there is an “align” tool you can use to precisely separate the cards on a perfect grid, but your eye did a nice job. One other trick is to start with a vector image of each scan so when you downsample to get a reasonable file size you keep close to the original resolution.

Nice work!


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Nice topic. I have to give you some credit Ignatius. You posted a while back on blowout about your effort to pair down your collection so you could get some of those top Goudey cards and it really resonated with me. It's this idea of how to get some cohesiveness in your collection. Recently I have embarked on a "rule of 3" philosophy where I try to get three nice examples from sets that I like. Here's the results so far. Working on a few others to add to the below 3-somes, such as 48 Bowman (need Musial and Yogi) and 54 Bowman (just need a nice specimen to go with Peewee and Whitey).

https://i.imgur.com/05fyLlX.jpg

Wow, that’s a great collecting theme! You’ve already got some great ones and I’m excited to see how this progresses. Very nice!


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