"If I Had Only Known When I Started This Deck That ......"

tarotbear

Note: If you are actually using Photoshop. Use LAYERS. Turn any element that you are going to need to resize into a Smart Object (from the Layers menu). Smart objects can be resized up and down, over and over, *without ever losing resolution*. And when you save the file you save the smart object *as* a smart object. If you decide you need to resize it again the next time you open it, you can do so.

Yes - I do wish MS PAINT had some rudimentary form of LAYERS - I have done some pretty detailed atmospherics and if I could just do them on a layer and have it put behind everything I would be so much happier!

Believe it or not - last Black Friday - after months of research - I finally bought a digital drawing pad since I was told holding a stylus would be better for my wrists (carpel tunnel). I intended to play around with it and get to know it while I was stitching my all-important cross-stitch. When my apartment went underwater in January - everything stopped, and I am still using MS PAINT to finish the cards .... I have never plugged the digital drawing pad in! ($150.00!)
 

tarotbear

Adding to this: makeplayingcards.com (MPC) operates very much like Printer's Studio. They have templates for the different standard size/proportions of the cards they offer *and* templates for a box if you want a custom box. You can also just have your shrinkwrapped deck sent you in a plain white box, with or without a window in it, for an extra $0.10 each deck.

Thank you for yet another possibility for Tarot Deck printing! Yes - browsing their page it seems very similar to how Printer's Studio is set up.

I LIKE the 'Uncut Sheets' idea - I wonder if they ship them in a tube? That way you can always get an uncut sheet framed as art for your wall ... now you have me thinking ... })
 

JOdel

Yes - I do wish MS PAINT had some rudimentary form of LAYERS - I have done some pretty detailed atmospherics and if I could just do them on a layer and have it put behind everything I would be so much happier!

Believe it or not - last Black Friday - after months of research - I finally bought a digital drawing pad since I was told holding a stylus would be better for my wrists (carpel tunnel). I intended to play around with it and get to know it while I was stitching my all-important cross-stitch. When my apartment went underwater in January - everything stopped, and I am still using MS PAINT to finish the cards .... I have never plugged the digital drawing pad in! ($150.00!)

I used a Wacom tablet in my first Photoshop class back in 1999. I got reasonably good with it. But those were ADB tablets and Apple abandoned ADB for USB right about that same time. I didn't replace my tablet until some years and at least two computers later, and by then the whole issue of trying to map a 17, or maybe it was a 21-inch screen onto a 12-inch tablet was rather too much of a chore to give it the attention that the transition would have taken. I'm perfectly willing to paint with a mouse.

My primary 3D marketplaces also carry 2D content, including some splendid Photoshop brush collections which rather a lot of people say that they can use in GIMP, which is a free program. Photoshop, even as a "single program" subscription is a considerable investment. Particularly given that it is now only available from Adobe as a subscription through Creative Cloud. Photoshop Elements -- which I think still operates on the "perpetual license" model (i.e., buy it and use it as long as it will run on your OS) can use any brushes designed for Photoshop, and also has about 80% of the features of the full program.

Adobe has a poor track record with consumer-grade software. Their consumer products are typically very good for what they do, but Adobe has a habit of losing interest and abandoning them after 3-4 years. Photoshop Elements seems to be an exception though. It's up to version 10, and I've heard no rumor that it's going away any time soon.

If you're trying to simulate analog art, Corel's Painter is the definitive standard there. But that program really *needs* a tablet.
 

JOdel

Thank you for yet another possibility for Tarot Deck printing! Yes - browsing their page it seems very similar to how Printer's Studio is set up.

I LIKE the 'Uncut Sheets' idea - I wonder if they ship them in a tube? That way you can always get an uncut sheet framed as art for your wall ... now you have me thinking ... })

Someone in another thread pointed out that MPC and Printer's Studio appear to have the same address. So the actual printers may be someone else entirely, who fills orders from both.

I don't know if they sell the work in uncut sheets. It might be worth it to ask, but the sheets might be a very awkward length.
 

tarotbear

They don't do the uncut sheets in Tarot card size. :(
 

JOdel

Oh, well.

Actually iirc (and I may be misremembering), the layout for doing a deck is only four images across, which is narrow enough to be intended for something other than a plotter, unless the layout that you see on screen from the internet is quite different from how the cards actually get laid out on the sheet at their end. Which, when you think about it, really is more than likely.

For example, the Tarot deck layout comes in four long columns. I laid mine out (my personal decks include the opener card shown on my website. I didn't include that one in the archives for download) with each suit in a column. The finished cards came stacked in order *by suit*. Now, just how likely is it that the sheet is first split into long columns and the cards assembled from those? No, what you see is probably something quite different from what gets sent to the plotter. There is some invisible (to the customer) algorithm that the job goes through first.
 

tarotbear

"WHADDAYA MEAN I HAVE TO WRITE OUT CARD MEANINGS? I'm an Artiste, not a Writer!"

Yes.

Chances are that if you are going to create a single deck only for your own use that you already know the card meanings you attach to the cards you've generated, so there is no need to pull out the ink & goose quill.

Let me relate this true story:

Once upon a Tarot Time many years ago during the First, first Bush Administration, I actually had someone rather naively quote me a price so cheap to produce PC images for a tarot deck that I should have jumped on it right then and there. However, I thought 'What good is having card designs if I can't get them printed?' So I immediately started contacting legitimate card publishing companies. One of them - which I even spoke to on the phone - asked me if the deck 'had a book' to which I responded - 'It could - why?' They responded that a publisher that has a deck AND a book can sell the deck separately, the book separately, and the deck & book together AS A {boxed} SET - which increases profits. This is how I started writing what became my first (and best-selling book) - even though the deck itself never materialized.

Back to the thread:

No one is asking you to become the next Ernest Hemingway. However, if you choose to create some really original artwork and you intend to try to sell it commercially - you may need some sort of LWB (Little White Book) to go with your deck, even if it only has one or two sentences for each card. To make your deck saleable you have to make it usable. Unlike Monsieur PIA a few posts back who declared "I am an artist - they will have to figure out the meaning for themselves!" - no one is going to buy a deck of cards which bear no recognizable images and be told - "The cards mean whatever you want them to mean." {Exception: The Arcane Bullshit Deck works exactly this way - but it's so far off-the-wall that written explanations for 'The All-Seeing Slice of Pizza' would get in it's way.}

If you go the TGC route - you can create a booklet (adds to the cost), you can create 1 or 2 pages of text that can either be printed and folded into the box (adds to cost - but is cheap), or you can have a PDF download that the purchasers can download and print themselves (no cost to add to your deck). In this way - if your Three of Wands card has a floating eyeball, a UFO, and a Conestoga Wagon wheel on it - the purchaser at least has your explanation to fall back on - as weird as it is.

Think about it ...
 

tarotbear

Oh, well.

Actually iirc (and I may be misremembering), the layout for doing a deck is only four images across, which is narrow enough to be intended for something other than a plotter, unless the layout that you see on screen from the internet is quite different from how the cards actually get laid out on the sheet at their end. Which, when you think about it, really is more than likely.

Printers Studio prints them out in the order the file saves them - which is usually alphabetized - so if you are tricky you can make sure the title card comes first, followed by the Majors, the Suits, and then the 'Bio' card. (20 cards to a sheet means 4 sheets and 80 cards - so create a Lead and a Bio card to fill up the two blank card spaces.)
 

JOdel

My deck's "book" only exists online. I did include a capsule interpretation for each card which is posted on each card's page. The printers that I linked to do not do the books, only the cards.

Of course anyone can copy the info off the internet and combine it in a text file. If they really want to. Or they can just use Eden Gray. Or any other book on interpretation.
 

JOdel

Actually, thinking over your uncut sheet idea; IF your deck is produced digitally, (and even if it isn't you've probably had to scan the images) You could almost certainly lay them out on a page to make a poster and submit *that* to your Printer's Studio company which will put the image on things other than just cards. I'm sure that they would probably print posters.

You'd need to find out what size of poster they produce, and do the work on your own before submitting it. But these outfits have things set up so that it's the customer who does the setup work anyway.