Beginnings: 1880’s: Errors & Outtakes

Most of the cards on this page represent very early examples of my work.

When I started designing the 1880’s series, I thought folks would prefer artwork that was as faithful to the Old Judge and Buchner Gold Coin cards as possible. For example, I painstakingly matched the players’ Old Judge images with their Buchner Gold Coin backgrounds (i.e., Buck Ewing’s Old Judge image is superimposed onto Buck Ewing’s Buchner Gold Coin background), thinking this would be really cool and important to people (“Hey! I can get both Ewings on one card!”). And I actually did very little else to the finished product, as evidenced below – striving for authenticity.

While I had cleaned the Buchner backgrounds and borders up quite a bit, I left the original artwork virtually untouched. While I had colored the Old Judge images, I intentionally desaturated the colors and did little to improve the quality of the original images.

While I was striving for one interpretation of authenticity, I quickly discovered that most collectors prefer a different interpretation of authenticity – a sharp, crisp, clean, vibrant, and richly colored interpretation; and furthermore, that my attempts to match players between their Old Judge images and Buchner backgrounds wasn’t too important to people. The message was clear: pay less homage and invoke greater originality. So my work evolved . . .

. . . and some cards were left behind. For some, I found better images of the same players in different poses. For others, certain complexities about the images forced me to put the projects on hold.

Some of these cards will be revisited, re-designed, and re-released. Some will not. I will do my best to explain the status of each card in the details below.