At the start of the week, I made a schedule of work that I needed to get done over the week and a half in order to get my cards designed.
Character Designs
This week I finished up all of the character designs for the cards. After my resolution to stop being so precious with my designs, I found I had more freedom in creating my illustrations and the character designing seemed to flow far more organically. I was also able to get feedback from a few of my classmates during the design process which cut down on time I would have spent overthinking small decisions. Overall I'm quite pleased with how the characters turned out, there may be some little changes I have to make depending on the backgrounds e.g. scaling etc.
Background Designs
I had hoped to start the card backgrounds on Wednesday however I was a day delayed as I took a mental health day. This knocked on my schedule slightly for the week but if I keep at the rate I have been working at I should be able to make up the time. I started creating the designs on Thursday and will be working on them all of today in the hopes they are finished by afternoon tomorrow. Initially I had thought about creating individual backgrounds for each character however I have decided to go with a standard background layout across the whole deck to bring more cohesion overall. You can see more in-depth look at my work on the backgrounds in my previous blog post. These are the designs I will be working on refining further to come to a final design for the backgrounds.
Card Backs & Box Design
Over the weekend, I will be aiming to get the card back designs started and finished and start the box design. This is so that I will hopefully have all final designs created before my meeting with my lecturer on Tuesday morning so that I can get feedback for further refinements before the deadline in 2 weeks.
Deck Printing
Standard Printers got back to me from last week, and quoted me a price for €180 for the deck to be printed, and approximately €85 for the box. At this point I was quite surprised, maybe naively I had estimated that the cards would not cost more than €100 to print. I contacted my lecturers to double that this price would be industry standard and they recommended that I contact a couple of other printers to compare. I reached out to 5 other printers in Galway for quotes. After receiving a couple more quotes they all came out to around the €200-€300 mark for the deck and box.
At this point, I found out from my lecturers that it was no longer necessary to print my deck. As we are no longer having a physical in person final exhibition, all submissions will be digital. Although I would love to have a printed final deck at the minute I can't afford to print the deck professionally. However, my lecturers did comment that if I was still committed to printing my deck that I should contact the on campus print facility, the FabLab. This service would be a lot cheaper than outside printers. I contacted the FabLab and they were able to tell me that they don't print card, but that most students print on paper and cut out and apply the art to card themselves. Ivan from the FabLab offered to show me the different paper types they have if I am able to come on campus at some point this week. Over the weekend, I will be mulling over if I'm going to go with this or if I will decide to instead create high quality mockups of my deck.