Samanayr art cards - how they're made

Samanayrs have been a project of mine for a number of years now, a mixture of art, virtual pet, and roleplaying community. If you'd like to learn more about what a Samanayr is, exactly, there's a post on the Samanayr forum that sums them up fairly well.

The Samanayr art cards, or ACEOs, are a recent project. An art card is a small piece of art that's 2.5" by 3.5", the size of a typical playing card. The Samanayr cards feature the original drawing of the Samanayr as well as its name, species, and gender, and as well as the actual card the buyer receives the virtual version fo the Samanayr to participate in the community with. If you're interested in my process for making the cards, read on!

The first step is to draw all of the Samanayrs that will be turned into cards. This is done over a few sessions, since I can only make so many at one time. Once I have a good number, at least 10, then it's time to make cards. The backgrounds for the cards are printed from my computer, as many as I can fit on a page.


Here you can see all of my materials - the pages of Samanayrs and backgrounds, my dinky little paper cutter, black cardstock, and my trusty gluestick.


Next comes a lot of cutting. I cut 2.5" x 3.5" pieces out of the black cardstock, cut out the backgrounds, cut out the Samanayr images, and also cut black backgrounds for the drawings. That's four things per card that have to be cut out, and unfortunately sometimes my paper cutter and I don't get along. Here's all of the cut-out pieces waiting to be assembled.


A great deal of careful gluing and lining pieces up later, the cards are complete! Shown is my most recent batch of cards, ready to go to their new homes.