I was going to get my cards printed by Moo, using their business card printing deal. It wasn’t ideal but it was the only place I could find that allowed me to order multiple cards in a pack all with different illustrations on one side and a uniform design on the other.
The problem with the Moo solution is that the cards don’t come in packs of 54 so I’d need to order a two packs to make a single card deck and have lots left over. Also business cards are a fair bit smaller than traditional playing cards.
And then some wonderful person alerted me to http://abetterwaymerch.com who not only print custom card decks, but present them in a nifty plastic box and at a fraction of the price of the business cards from Moo, even though they’re shipped from the states!
Result! I’m really looking forward to getting the cards finished now!

I’ve started working on designing the illustrations for a custom set of playing cards featuring the characters from my web-comic; Odd-Fish.
So far I’ve drawn all the kings (Lovecraft in four different poses), the backs of the cards and one of the queens (Zebra queen)
I’ll also be doing Howard as the jacks and I’ll need a couple of jokers too, but I haven’t decided who to use for those yet. Possibly Hugh Manatee though. What do you think?

To celebrate the end of the epic story I’ve been running for a month and a half on Odd-Fish, I’ve had some new button badges made featuring the Zebra Queen.
I once again had them made by a little online company called AmpsBadges who, although small, never fail to impress with the prices, speed and quality of their product.
I highly recommend them.

So that now makes two Odd-Fish button badges that I can uses as freebies on Odd-Fish and sell at conventions. For those of you who don’t remember, here’s the first design. Lovecraft with Mr Potatohead.

I’m always starting new projects, I must have ten or more on the go at any one time. I do get them finished… eventually but I find it hard to stay focussed.
In fact Odd-Fish as a whole was partly an attempt to break this habit and force me to keep up a sustained effort over an extended period of time without letting it fall by the wayside and so far it’s pretty much worked. Odd-Fish has been studiously undated regularly for the last ten months.
But at what cost? Other projects, most notably Biro-Art have fallen foul of my old habits in favour of Odd-Fish and nor Biro-Art has only been updated once in nearly a year. It’s not that I don’t want to update, it’s just that I never seem to get the time. There’s always something else that needs doing, like an new Odd-Fish strip or something to watch on telly or the constant daily urge to eat and sleep.
I’ve even been avoiding getting any new games so that I don’t spend hours shooting monsters when I should be wrangling a biro.
It doesn’t help that it’s become a hell of a lot more busy at work either. I used to use drawing as a way of avoiding boredom on long, quiet shifts but now there’s no such thing. Our branch is no longer open overnight so my beloved night shifts are no longer available and the service stays stupidly busy well past midnight these days so I’ve pretty much given up even taking out a pencil at work any more.