Ho Ho Holiday Contest entry

Beardy has the entries for the Ho Ho Holiday Contest posted up and I wanted to try and explain my rationale for why I chose the card I entered for Beardy's Ho Ho Contest.

It wasn't hard for me to use Festivus as inspiration for the contest. I really like the show Seinfeld and I've always liked that episode. I also like that somebody really did invent their own holiday especially one that was against onslaught of consumerism in the celebration of our holidays.

When I thought of "Festivus" as a theme, I immediately plopped in the DVD to watch the episode. Something about the word "Festivus" made me think of colored circles with letters inside them. Sort of like the 2008 Topps baseball and football cards.
I don't really like that design much, so I decided on the Heritage design for a few reasons.

One of the reasons was the episode itself.



When Frank Costanza and Kramer walk into Monk's Diner to confront George about the rebirth of Festivus, Frank tells George it's his "heritage" to celebrate Festivus.


Also in the coffee shop scene George and Jerry are talking about Jerry's new girlfriend who they dub "two face" because she looks completely different depending on the lighting.


Like the Batman villan Harvey Dent aka: "Two Face".



Jerry mentions that she's like a baseball card where the player moves when you turn it a certain way.



George responds: "I see, tilt it one way and the player is on base, turn it another way and advancing the runner."



So those two reasons made me think I was on the right track to do a cool holiday card in the 1960 design.

The fact that they mentioned baseball cards in this episode made me think...


... that maybe it's another Festivus Miracle!!!


Now on with the card:

Here is the front.



I tried doing a Heritage style chrome card. I like the chromes better in real life anyway. (Who doesn't like shiny chrome!?), so I tried deasturating the background in the screen shot and adding a silver color overlay. Neither of them really made it look authentic. I tried a few other filters, but I never could get it to work out right. I did want to make the foreground characters to stand out better so I left them alone and edited the background to my liking.

I also did a slightly different version with a Frank Constanza character pointing upward as he tells Kramer about his creation of Festivus.



I ended up keeping the simpler design of the Festivus Pole instead of a "player" cutout.

Here is the back of the card.

I tried "roughing it up" a little to make it seem like the rough backs like the Heritage cards.

Here is a real Heritage back for comparison.


I'm not sure if the back looks authentic either, but I like it okay. I decided to not include any sort of Topps logo or legal stuff on the back or front. I probably should have to make it look more like a real card, but it looks fine to me.

In retrospect though, I probably should've changed the background of the card back to a light brownish color to make it look a little more like the real card.



I kept referring to my Jose Reyes chrome card as a reference.


I noticed when looking at the card I missed one important thing: I didn't put a silver border around the card. Another strike against me. I'm hoping that I'm not screwing myself by posting up my mistakes.

All in all it was a fun contest to enter. Hopefully I will at least place in the top three or get an honorable mention.

I really do like all the other entries. I had noticed that Mark's Ephemera had already posted up his entry and I was starting to feel a lot less confident in my card entry. Looking at everybody's entries makes me feel a whole lot less confident. Oh well. It was fun to make the card and it'll be fun to see who wins it.