Ladies and gentlemen, this is currently what you see in my office, just next to my desk: I can hear you thinking "Hmmmm, I wonder how many complete custom sets he has made from all this." Nope.  Just nope.  I swear, if I were an ice carver, you could give me a metric ton of ice, and I'd be lucky if I could carve out a thimble.  Yeah, I'm the one who, in elementary school was cutting something out with scissors, kept getting one side crooked, and compensated by doing the other side ... only to make that side crooked,

One of my next projects might be a nice run of Roberto Clemente cards.  As you know, Clemente passed away quite a while ago.  You also probably know that he was one heck of a baseball player. Did you know though, that he hit number 3,000 for his career in the last regular game he ever played?  Yup, he had exactly 3,000 hits.  I think that is just so amazing.  It kind of makes me bummed out thinking about Gehrig, and how he was only 7 shy of 500 homers.  Clemente getting 3,000 smack dab on the button?  Awesome! It

So, the last few days have been very, very exhausting and frustrating.  I have been trying out many different methods to get the desired look *just right* for my newest customs. Before I go any further, I'm going to remind you who is writing this.  Me.  The crazy dude who collects that one dude who had a ball hit off his head and go into the stands for a homer.  The guy who put the spotlight on the whole steroids thang, and hurt the generation of ballplayers I grew up watching of going into the hall of fame.  Well hey,

Easter is around the corner, and I thought it would be appropriate to toss some easter eggs into my most recent PC item:  A 2013 Topps Jose Canseco (duh!) - autograph prototype  1/1 SSP.  :) This one was a doozie, as I was practicing all kinds of different methods, papers, techniques, etc.  I have finally risen from the card stock, cutters and recovered from the adhesive vapors to tell the story. One of my first customs was a 2013 Jose Canseco A's card.  Just a plain, base white card.  I enjoyed it, but wanted to do refractors and a super.

As I was just getting into creating custom cards a few weeks back, I thought I should probably venture outside of the realm of Canseco-dom, and try other players.  One player that came to mind was (of course) his former brother of bash - Mark McGwire. I love cards of his when he was playing for team USA, but the problem was that I simply could not find many (or any!) suitable pics for my project.  I remembered seeing some 2011 Topps chrome blue refractors of players on Team USA, and absolutely loved the design.  I thought to myself, how

Ah yes, Goudey.  First introduced in the 1930's with spokesperson Lou Gehrig at the bottom.  Throughout the years, many people have tried to remake them, and finally, in the late 2000's, Upper Deck did, and got it right.  They added two flavors:  1 with Jeter on the front, and 1 with Griffey on the front.  The packs contained potential minis, green backs, black backs, red backs, blue backs, and a host of inserts. The back has some cool little silhouettes (yes, I can spell that right ... finally!) of players playing baseball.  They vary in action shots from card to

Okay everyone - I've been laboring over this for quite some time now.  The learning curve / research / testing / time / materials has been huge, but here it is: Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire Custom Dual Patch Booklet! I started out designing in Photoshop, of course.  I was working on another for someone, and ended up using similar artwork, but changed it to meet the needs of my personal collection.  I found a GREAT picture, of the Bash Brothers doing the bash.  I'm very happy with how the graphics turned out. Then, after I got everything lined up,