Sunwashed Junk

It's another rainy day here in Portland, and so I thought I'd throw back to some summer cardartin' I did in collaboration with ol' Mr. Sun.

This post is also inspired by Nick V. who left the following comment on my recent Don Mattingly post:

"Okay it took me a moment to realize that the 88 mod was Baseball's Best. I was briefly SUPER impressed that you managed to fade the blue. Occurs to me to wonder how the red and orange 1990 borders would fare here."

Way ahead of ya, Nick!... 

This "white border" '90 Donruss Tony Gwynn took me a couple years, if I recall, maybe three. Got a little sloppy on the sides of the photo, but not too bad. If the player name had been in black or blue, this would look pretty cool, but since the name gets washed away, I wouldn't grade this mod variety as one I'm compelled to make more of, especially considering how very long they take to make. But it was a neat experiment and left me with another unique oddity for my big Mr. Padre PC.

And back to Nick's '88 Donruss comment, yeah, if you try bleaching the borders of a regular '88D card, all that will happen is the little red bits in the middle will fade, but the black and blue hold strong*. But then those orange Baseball's Best cards in the same design give you something more to work with. I haven't made much of these, just the Donnie, this Mark Grace, and a Barry Bonds for my Barry Bonds guy**.

*Probably after like a decade the blue would fade? 

**Actually, I think I stopped that one at yellow so it would be a Pirates colormatch

Here's another idea I have to give Nick V. credit for suggesting. Yeah, the folks at Topps bizarrely tinted the background on Billy Williams' 1974 Topps card, ostensibly to make the player pop better in the photo, but it just looks weird, like it was Free Bowl of Curry Day at the stadium and the crowd rioted. I've been making my own "collector corrected" variations, bleaching away the yellow but keeping Billy and his bat from getting faded with it. Above are 3 of my mods along with a regular card for comparison. I put one in my set, can use another in the PC, but have several that I've been meaning to make available FT/FS one of these days. I figure anyone with a "master set" of '74 Topps could use the unofficial variation to kick up their set. And I do still need several '74 Topps variations to "fully" complete my '74 set (spreadsheet) so I'm hoping these will make good trade chips.

With the '82 Kmart set, the AL MVPs feature a middle bar of blue in the background (won't fade), but the NL MVPs have yellow, so those are fun and easy to whitewash into a cleaner look like the Cobra here. I've also got Clemente, Mays, and Garvey versions that I couldn't locate in time for this post, but if any of my trader buds want one, just let me know.

Speaking of Steve Garvey, here's a funky one for gcrl if he wants it. There was a surface blemish in the background of this card, so I did a "blackout" style that came out ok. Sometimes figuring out the best way to deal with a problem helps come up with new ideas.

More playing with 1987 Topps. Some of these I tried to make the border sorta sync up to the photo, with the Pete Rose turning out the best of those attempts. These are up for trade.

 

But I'm still hoarding 1987 Topps Bo Jackson cards all to myself! Each of these is unique like a snowflake or someshit. Love 'em and hope to make more next summer.

Thanks for stopping by!