Self-Publish an Oracle Deck

1. Introduction: Hi and welcome to my class. How to self publish an Oracle Day. My name is Monica Sterile ski, and I'm a freelance artist and teacher with a background in graphic design. My art has evolved in many ways over the last few years and often mirrors my own spiritual journey. I began using Oracle cards as a way to provide me with insight, advice and the ability to stay grounded. Which is why I've amassed so many decks in the last few years. They've become an invaluable tool for me. I've always loved the variety, the artwork and especially the magical messages that have always been so synchronised. IQ. If you're not know Oracle cards, please know that you can still use this class for creating any sort of deck. Whether it's custom playing cards, a game that you've created. Or maybe you want to create a wedding favor, the process will still be the same. In this class. I'll walk you through my process for self publishing, your very own deck that you can then offer for sale. We'll talk about scanning your artwork and how to build the each of your hearts in photo shop. I'll show you an effective way to prove your cards prior to sending them out to be printed and walk you through the upload process. You'll need a basic knowledge of both. Adobe Photo Shop and illustrator will be using CC in this class, and you also need your own completed artwork prior to starting this class. It could be anything from practice sheets, painted swatches and doodles or even splatters of paint. Once you finish this class, you'll be well on your way to offering your deck to the world. I look forward to seeing you in class. 2. Scanning: Okay, so now we're going to talk a little bit about the artwork and digitizing it with your scanners so that you can work with it in a couple of different ways. So when you're scanning a piece of our work, you need to ask yourself what your intention is with the piece of artwork. Is it a completed piece? And you just want to scan it in its entirety because that's how you plan on using it or is it a piece that you've created? But you want to really blow it up and pull out maybe a certain section of it, and that's what will be on the actual card. So I've chosen to do a piece that is just kind of an abstract background that I made for. I really don't know what, but it's something that I can use now. I could use this in its entirety, Most definitely. But my plan is to pull out some of these areas like this because the detail, once you scan it at a high resolution, is really fantastic. So I have chosen Juice PMS and a high d p. I. Because I know that I'm gonna blow this way up. Now, if I were to just use this piece in its entirety on the card and I had no plans of blowing it up, I would just stick with Ah, 300 d p i. But since I know that, I'll be blowing it up, I'll choose. Ah, higher GP I. I've chosen 1200 and just make sure that you have enough room on your computer before you start scanning these files because they can get pretty big. And I've already selected preview and this is what comes up. And then I take my little marquee and I I use an Epson Expression 16 80 scanner, and your settings may look a little bit different, but it's essentially the same process. So what I'll do is I'll select, um, the piece that I'm that I'm going to scan, and I'm not quite sure why. There we go, So this allows me to scan the actual piece of artwork and not the entire scanner bed. There's no reason for me to scan this empty space down here, so that's why I used to do that in the Settings box. I always keep my in our professional mode if I'm scanning artwork. If I'm scanning just a regular document that I would use office motorhome mode, I usually keep my own professional mode, and I usually keep all of these settings the same. I have reflective document table and photograph the image type. I want 24 bit color, and you have other settings here that you can use for other applications. But I leave this on 24 bit color, and my resolution is probably the most important setting. So, like I said before, no, your intention before you choose the resolution. If you plan on blowing this way up, then yes, you want toe have access to all of these little details in here than it needs to be scanned at a really high resolution. If you were to scan it at a 300 g p I and blow it up, it would get really pixelated, and you would just have to re scan it at a higher resolution and the settings down here in my scanner. I don't I really don't mess with any of thes All of the adjustments that I make I do in Photoshopped. Okay, so now what we'll do we'll hit the scan button and it will bring up another dialogue. Bucks. It will ask you where you want to save it. I have You can browse to the folder or create a new folder, this in my program and asks me what the prefix is going to be. And then it has a number. The image format is probably the most important on the dialogue bucks. I always save mine as a tiff file. And the reason for that is that I just want to be able to work with, ah, the highest quality image I possibly can. When I'm scanning at this large of a D. P. I. You do have some other options. Um, I don't touch those. I just change it to a tiff file and then I select okay, And I've already scanned this piece. I'm not gonna hit okay right here, because this will definitely take a whale. So I wanted to show you I have scanned, um, several pieces of artwork for the Oracle deck that I created, and I just wanted to show you some of the, um the pieces that I actually chose to scan because a lot of them were not finished pieces . So I have pieces like this and let me make the Icahn's a little bit bigger here. So, as you can see, I have a lot of exercise type things that I've done a lot of abstract pieces, and I scanned all of these a really high resolution. I do have some finished pieces and you can see when I hover over it. I did scan those at a really high resolution because I wasn't quite sure if I wanted to use this as a whole piece. Or maybe I just wanted to pick out, Um, maybe just the flour and blow it way up so it wasn't quite sure. So you can do that with all of your pieces of The big Thing is just to remember that you need tohave somewhere. You need to have enough storage space on your computer or an extra hard drive or cloud that you say that to. So next up we will start talking about arranging these and photo shop and how you work with these images in Photoshopped to create your cards 3. Publishers: in this lesson, I'll show you how to pick a manufacturer and decipher the options that they offer so that you can choose a price point that you're comfortable with and also explain a little bit about use of their templates. So there are many, many manufacturers out there in the world. A lot of them have minimum deck orders. Some start at maybe 100 decks or 50 decks, which is a lot for the initial investment of a deck. That's one of the biggest reasons that I chose. Make playing cards dot com. As you can see over here, they the price point is broken down from 1 to 56 to 29 decks 30 to 49. And the more that you order the lower the price goes Now. This is for the custom jumbo cards, and that is the size of the deck that I used when I was creating my Oracle cards. And you can change several of these options and the price point will change also as you select different options, I went with the standard smooth and let's see what's happening here. I went with the standard smooth packaging, and I also chose a rigid box, a custom rigid box, and you'll see here once this stops, uh, turning that there are many different options for the boxes, depending on the cards that you choose. Now, when you go up here and you look at the game cards, there are so many different options. So what you need to do first, your first step when you decide that, Yes, you would like to start publishing your own Oracle decks or whatever kind of cards that you want to make. The first thing you need to do is research all of the sizes that are available to you because that will, um, that will take you into photo shop. And and that's where you start building your template for the cards based on the cards that you've picked. So you don't want to put the horse before the cart and set up a square template in photo shop and start scanning artwork to match a square. And then you see something like this and you think, Oh, this would be much, much better suited to what I want to dio. So always start here, and you do not obviously have to go with make playing cards dot com. Like I said, there are other manufacturers out there. I just found that these work to the best for myself, something else that they offer. They have a marketplace. They are a print on demand site so you can sell your designs. Set up a storefront right on their website, and they have all of the information here and you'll receive a percentage of the card and which makes sense because they're doing all of the manufacturing, and they're also doing this shipping. They're taking care of everything, and then you get a portion of it so you can check that out and they'll walk you through those steps. If that's something that you want to dio so for myself, I have chosen to order my decks and carry my own inventory. That way I can sell them from my website, my Etsy shop and the shipping will go a little bit quicker if I'm carrying my own inventory . Also, I have more control about shipping the item. I can add in gifts if I'd like personalized thank you cards, those types of things. So that's something else that you need to think about. How you want to sell your deck and whether you want to carry the inventory, which will be more of an upfront cost or to get started, baby, you just want to sell it directly from their marketplace. So that's something else that you need to decide. Well, now take a look at the specifications that make playing cards dot com offers and each of these image file tips are underneath any of the card templates that you decide you want to look at. But it's pretty much the same across the board for the entire site. They will accept any color mode. RG PCM y que in grayscale. If you're using black and white images, these are the images that will be accepted through them and for this class will be working in PNG. Files will be exporting our cards as PNG files and will make sure that our resolution is set to 300 d. P I. And then they have the bleed, and it's an eighth of an inch, um, for the outer bleed and then for the safety area. There's an eighth of an inch on the inside of that, and I'll show you that next as faras. The templates go and building the cards, and we are going to work off of this custom jumbo card size, and it's 3.5 by five. And they do have a template that you can download, and I'll show you your template, um, from them and I'll show you why I don't use it and why I like to create my own. And then you have their card maker video, which is a little two minute tutorial on how to upload your cards. And we'll talk about a player uploading and starting your design and saving your design later on in the class. Once we've built all of our cards here we are in photo shop, and this is the template that I built. And basically what I've done is I have, um, pulled the guides over to the specific measurements that I need, and I'll show you how to build that in just a second. And I wanted to show you their template that they give you that you can download. The template has all of the information that you need on it for your specific card size. So if you're a little bit confused as to what your, um, actual card size should be. Then this will give it to you right here. So it's five and 1/4 by three and 3/4 and this is good for the information, but not necessarily great for working with. And I'll show you why. This is all on one layer in photo shop, and they give you another layer that says, Place our work here. Well, I've dropped my artwork in, and unfortunately makes it extremely difficult to kind of judge where my text is because I have all of this overlying text from their template. They did not put their text on a separate later, so I can't turn the text on and off, um, to see just the actual safe area lines and the bleedin the cut line. So that's why I don't use it, because if I hide this layer, it's just my card and I can't really see. I can't see any of the important things that I need to see. So what we'll do is we'll build our own and it will look like this, which I just showed you. But we're going to start off in the next lesson with building our cards and I'll walk you through how to set up this file structure. That's all one file. I've grouped all of the cards together as their own card so that I can easily go back if I want to turn this card on, I just click the eyeball for the visibility and I pushed the U Drop Down Arrow so that I can open up what's in this group. And I have the image, and I also have the text that lies on top. And these have all been put into their own separate folders so that when I collapse this, I can turn off the visibility and go to another card. This makes it really, really super easy to go back through and edit anything. If it's organized this way, and this is what we'll talk about in the next lesson, we'll go ahead and will build this file out, and I'll show you how to set up your templates so that you could make sure everything gets printed correctly. 4. Build Your Card: in this lesson, we're going to start building out our cards. And if you're a little confused about the size or you want to make sure that you have your sizing, correct, if you're going to use a different size other than this jumbo size card template that we've selected for this class, you can always download the template so that you can see what the full bleed documents I should be at, which is right here. It says five and 1/4 by three and 1/4. I'm not going to be working with this because we've already discussed that that, um, that you can't get rid of the text layer or so we'll be building our own, so you'll need to go appearing and click file new. And we need to make sure that we have our bleed added in, which would make thes cards three and 3/4 by five and 1/4 and the orientation will be working in is a portrait orientation. Make sure that your resolution is set at 300 dp I or higher. I'll be working in RGB color mode. You can select grayscale if you're working with black and white images Ah, you can select C m y que also if you'd like, but I'm going to stick to the RGB 16 bit. I've got a white background campus, which is fine, and I'm gonna hit create now the next thing that we need to do now that we've got our documents set up with the bleed added in, we need to create some guides. That way we can make sure that all of our pertinent information are card stays within the safe area and that there's no, um, there's no possible way that any of it will be cut off. So we'll follow their guidelines by creating our our guides. And the 1st 1 will create is the trim line, which will be an eighth of an inch inside of the actual document size. So the easiest way to do this there are a couple of different ways you can make sure that your rulers are on by going to the view at the top and making sure that this is check mark so you can either grab ahold and drag a guide out or get rid of that one. The easiest way I find to do this is to go up to view and go down to new guide, and we're going to start off with our vertical guides first. So I know that an eighth of an inch on this side will be at located at 0.1 to 5, So we'll type that in and click OK, and it automatically pops up there. Now. If your guide is showing up as a different color, you can just double click on your ruler, and it will bring up this preferences. Dialog, bugs, select guides, grid and slices. And if you're using an older version of photo shop, this is, um, this is Photoshopped CC. You can go to the file menu and select Let's get out of this real quick. It's actually under the edit. The edit menu. Go down to preferences, and there you'll see in the fly out menu that you can select guides, grids and slices. I'm not sure if that double clicking on the ruler works and older versions or not, but I thought I would just point that out. So here is we're working on a canvas, not on art board. So this is where you can change the style of the line you can select solid or dashed, and this is where you can select the color. Just click on this watch, and then you can drag your slider up and down here to select the color and the actual saturation of the color. I'm going to stick with red so that you can see it. So now we need to create this line over on this side. That's an eighth of intention. So go up to view quick new guide and we're working vertically, and the next position that I have will be at three point 6 to 5 click, OK, and we need to do the same thing for the top and the bottom guides and will be working now horizontally. So the 1st 1 will be a 0.1 to 5 again, and the next one will be a five 0.1 to 5. Okay, so this is where our card will be cut. You need to make sure that any artwork that you're placing on your document on your canvas extends to this outer edge. You don't want to have any white showing when they cut the card. If the intention is to take your artwork all the way out to the edge, which in this class that's what we'll be doing. So the next thing that you need to set up, you need to set up another set of guides and that will show you the safe area so that if there's ever a problem with ah, the manufacturers trimming of the cards that say they shift during production or something very slightly, you want to make sure that all of your relevant information for your card is is within a safe area, and there's no chance of it being cut off. So that will be the next, um, that will be the next set of guides that we create, and it's really the same process except this guide. We're gonna go back and work on our vertical guide. We know that's going to be an eighth of an inch inside this line, which sits at 0.25 and on the opposite side, Click New Guide that will sit an eighth of an inch inside of this line, which is at 3.5, and we'll do the same thing for our horizontal guides. Make sure you click horizontal and this one will be at 10.25 and the next guide will be at five inches. Okay, so now that we have this set up, we can go back up to view. We're gonna look our guides that way. There's no chance of these moving while we're playing around with our artwork and trying to get a position where we want it. So now that we have this set up, the next thing that we're going to do will start bringing in some of our artwork to work on our first card. So you need to go down to the bottom right hand corner in your layers panel. Make sure that it it's visible. If it's not goto window, got a window and make sure that your layers panel is check marked. You want to click the plus button, and that will give you a new later that sits right on top of your background layer. Now, if you prefer working with transparent layers, you can always turn off your background layer. Now I The first thing that I would do is I would drop in some of the artwork that I've scanned Now. The artwork that I have scanned has not been edited at all, and I do my editing within my card template. And the reason I do that is it really doesn't make any sense for me to, ah, start pulling out backgrounds or adjusting things because it may not work within the template. Or maybe I'll change my mind. So I would rather build the card as I go and do all of the editing of the artwork right inside of my actual document. So what we'll do is we'll go up to file and I'm gonna use place linked. I really don't want to embed my my scans because there are large files I would rather length, Um, and that will make things a little bit quicker. And I'll select the image that we scanned earlier. And like I said, this hasn't been modified or edited at all. And you can see when I hover over this just how large it is, I'm gonna click place and photo shop will automatically size it to my document and turn it into a smart object. Now I know that obviously my artwork has to be bigger than the actual card because we need that that bleed so that when it's cut the artwork goes all the way to the edge. So in photo shop, grab one of the edges and start dragging. Now, if your artwork isn't staying constrained, you have this little link Icahn up here. You want to make sure that that is clicked on and you can see when you have over hover over it says maintain aspect ratio. And if I don't have that, if I don't have that clicked, then this is what I end up with. So we don't want to do that. I don't want to stretch my artwork or destroyed it in any way. So make sure that this is clicked toe on and I can grab the handles. And Aiken start, um, blowing this artwork up really large. And we had talked about this earlier. This is the reason that we scanned our artwork at such a high resolution because I wanted to have the ability if, um if I wanted, and I'm gonna zoom in here to get all of the's details on the card without them being blurry. Now let me zoom that go. So let's say that I really, really love the way that this looks here, and I have to keep in mind that this outer of this top edge anything past this first red line is will be cut off. Um, that line represents the edge of the card. So you want to make sure if there any parts that you really love, that they're not past this line. Your artwork does need to extend all the way out. Keep that in mind. You don't ever want to have an edge that looks like that. Um, you need to make sure that your artwork extends like I said all the way out to the edge of your document. So what I'm doing is I'm just kind of moving my artwork around. And, Aiken, zoom out. You consume out by clicking on your zoom tool and using your mouse, and we'll see what this looks like once it transforms the document so you can zoom way in and zoom way out by just holding down your left mouse key by using, you can scrub in and out. So once you have your artwork positioned on your document the way that you want, you need to ask yourself a couple of questions whether you want to start making adjustments on your our work, and you can do that by clicking on your layer that you're our work is on and you can go up to image. Go down to adjustments and you can make your adjustments here and I will probably start out with levels and you can make adjustments with the white of the card in the background and the contrast by dragging the dark slider over. And then you have the one in the middle and he kind of just play around with ease until you get something that you're happy with. Click OK, after you've made adjustments to your card and you can you can do all sorts of things from the human saturation. Ah, you can play around with, um, the hue. If you want to change the entire look of the card, you can do something strange like that. You could bump the saturation way up our way down, and you can also play with the lightness. And after you've made your adjustments, something else that you want to think about is the background. And when you scan artwork, it will obviously pick up the texture of the paper that your artwork is on and you need to decide if you're okay with leaving that and, ah, whether or not it would compromise any of thes little detailed areas that I actually like a lot. So if I zoom way in here, you can see all of these little splashes and spatters, and I think that gives the card a lot of character. So by removing the background, I would either have to mask out all of these areas which can get really tedious. Or I could just leave it. And I can make it as try to make that white area as bright as I can by adjusting and playing with levels. And like I said, you could do that over here by shifting things around. You don't want to drag the white edge up too much. Otherwise it'll have this blown out kind of look. So I think I'm okay with that, and I will zoom back out a little bit so I can see the document as a whole. And the next thing that I need to do is add some text and depending on what kind of text I want to add. If I plan on adding a paragraph, then I would click on my text and click and drag a text bucks, and then I can begin typing. And I'm just gonna leave that as this right now. Click my move tool to move it. And if I want to make any adjustments to the text, you can select in your character panel. And like I said, if you're not sure that those air on you don't see them go upto window and make sure that care, character and paragraph styles are, um, both on. So I will select my font appear and your size. Make sure that when you're working with text that you don't go any lower than eight points . Otherwise it becomes very difficult to read. And when you're working on a screen and you're working on items that will be printed, you have a very is kind of like a distorted view because depending on the size of your screen, you're not working with the actual size of the card. And so what looks okay to you may not actually print out correctly, and we're going to talk about that later when we talk about proofing our cards. So selective font select your font size make sure that the color that you select, that you have enough contrast that it's visible. I don't want to select anything like that because my text will disappear so I can select that color and click OK, and if I want to add just one word, I can go appear and click my text and I'll just click one time if I want to add just a single word and I'm gonna type example and I know I want this word to be larger. So I'm just going to click and drag. Now here's my information for my card and I want a position this some place that it makes sense. And right now my paragraph text right here is centered. And if I want to make any adjustments to my paragraph text, then I would go up into my paragraph tab and make the adjustments. Over here. You can align your text left or right, Senator it, or you can justify it, and I am going to leave it centered. And as you can see when I click and drag on my text box, you see these grid lines. If you don't go up to the view panel and you can click on Snap. And that will help when you're making these adjustments that, um your paragraph boxes and your word, they'll snap to each other and you'll be able to see those those grid lines or guidelines I should say. So now that you have some text and you are happy with your artwork, we'll go over here and we're gonna select each one of these layers by clicking on this and I'm gonna control click on the rest so everything is selected, and then I'm gonna go down here to this file folder icon, and I'm gonna create a new group. So it has taken everything that I selected and put it in this folder having a double click here, and I'm gonna rename this example and you would rename your card whatever your card is called. Ah, some reference that you can easily recognize. So we're We've completed our first card, and the process is the same over and over and over again, and you'll start off by creating a new layer by clicking on your plus icon in your layers panel and make sure that you're on this layer. You'll go up to file place linked and you will select your artwork. And I wanted to do a piece that, um, doesn't have much of a background on it on. I think I will select one of thes color palettes color wheels, actually, and make sure to turn off the visibility of your last card so it doesn't get confusing. Okay, So, like I said before, you can see that there is nothing on this that has been edited. Um, I like to do my editing right in the document, So I'm gonna go ahead and grab one of the corners and I'm going to stretch this way out because I'm interested in these watercolor circles and I'm gonna zoom out a little bit and I'm gonna stretch this artwork and blow it up really large. Now, as you can see, the way I have this position that everything would be cut off if I left it this way. So I need to make this a little bit smaller and start playing with the positioning of the artwork. I actually think that I like that because when I could do that is put my text over here and I can leave thes watercolor circles so I'm gonna go ahead and hit Enter so it will transform my artwork. And the next thing I'm gonna do dry zoom in a little. I need to ask myself those questions if I need to make any sort of image adjustments to make sure that you've got your image selected over here on the layers panel, go up to image and adjustments. And I think maybe I want to just saturate these colors just a little bit more and click, OK, And now I'm in a change some of the levels here and what what I'm trying to do is, I mean, to see if I can get this, um, background area a little more to the to the white side so that I don't have to pull out the background and I'll show you what I mean. So I can go over here and I can select this drop or tool the white dropper tool and then go and click on any area that is white in my documents so that it can adjust all of the levels based on white and we'll see what happens so you can see that I it it created, um it shifted everything so that this white background was indeed it's more. It's whiter and it doesn't look too bad, But I don't think that I want any of this texture from my watercolor paper. So while that looks great and it's nice and white, um, if I zoom way in, if I zoom way in, then I can. I can see all of these little bumps from the texture, and there's some some errors. Their asses. Well, you can see where my pencil line is, and these air choices that you'll just have to make. Whether you want to keep those in if it adds to the card or if it doesn't now for myself, I'm gonna remove the background. Okay, So in order to get rid of this background here, I'm going to use the magic one tool, and you can see when you have her over it that it select symbol, similarly colored image areas. And since I'm removing a background that is white and it has blobs of color, this should be really effective and pretty quick and the tolerance level appear atop. That's basically telling photo shop that whatever color I select that I wanted to select anything that's 20 shades lighter or 20 shades darker. And I think I'm gonna bump this up because thes colors are so saturated that I really there's really no chance of it selecting these colors. So I'm gonna click on my background one time, and you can see that it has outlined everything that is white. Now, if you'll notice I do not have the contiguous button Chuck Mart, And the reason that I don't is that I wanted it to also select anything that was inside of these letters. Now, if I had turned this on and made this election again, it won't select anything on the inside. Basically, the contiguous means, Um, as long as it's touching, Um, then it will select it. If it's not not to look for any other colors. That's why I check mark this off. I hope that made sense. You can see it visually. I'll click it again, and it selected the white no matter whether or not it was, um, touching each other or separated by another shape. So once you have your background selected, I'm gonna hit, delete and show you what happens because we have placed our image in photo shop and it was placed as a smart object. We can edit it. So what you need to do is go to your later where your artwork is and right click and select Rast, arise, layer, and that will give us the ability to edit our image. And now I'm gonna hit, delete and then also control D to get rid of your marching ants. And when you get rid of a background like this, you will need because we're saving This is a ping file, a PNG file. You will need to add a background under this. Otherwise, you know there's a There's a possibility that saving and I've had this happen a couple of times when I saved my file that the P saving it as a PNG file trimmed portions of the card that were transparent and ah, I don't want that to happen. I want this card to remain the same size so they're all uniform, obviously. So the easiest way to do that is to go down to this circle icon and click solid color. And I want this to be a white layer and make sure that you dragged this lighter all the way up into the left hand corner and double check that is, in fact, pure white. Go down to your hex number and make sure that they're all EFS and click. OK, And now what we need to do is drag this color fill layer underneath our artwork, and I'm gonna zoom in again. And this is where I would go and start cleaning up some of this and me being the way that I am. Um, I would get rid of this even though it's probably going to be cut off, it will be cut off, and I've selected my eraser tool and it's quite large. So I'm gonna push my bracket symbol, which is right underneath the, um the plus sign on your keyboard. You can make your eraser larger and smaller by by using the bracket keys. I'm just gonna get rid of some of the things that I see in here that I'm not too happy with or that I feel like need to be cleaned up. And I don't see anything really around these color, Um, these colors watches, but I most definitely don't want any of this. I'm gonna get rid of thes Okay, so now that that is done, I can start adding in text. So I will go over here and click on my text tool, click one time, and I'm gonna type color Well, and I definitely need to change the color of that. And I think what I want to do is make sure that this is selected. There we go and go over to my color swatch panel. And I, if you just go over, will automatically turn into the eyedropper tool. And I'm gonna select this blue click, OK? And, uh oh, were you just the sizing here? Look, enter and I'll grab my text tool again. I'm gonna click and drag because I want to add paragraph text and we'll call that good will leave it as this example text. And it's the same process. So I want to make sure that this is all group together in one folder, so I'll make sure that these air all of these different layers, are selected by holding down the control key and selecting each one. Once they're all selected, go down to the bottom and click your folder Double click and we'll rename this color wheel so Now we've created two cards, and this is the entire process of building out your cards, and it's very repetitive and what I like about setting up your file your document file like this is that if you need to make changes or you need to edit the text, everything is nice and organized. So now it's your turn. Go ahead and set up your template and create your document and start adding in artwork and text. And in the next lesson, we'll talk a little bit about exporting your file and will begin proofing our cards. 5. Exporting and Proofing: in this lesson, we're going to talk a little bit about some extra cards that you should make for your deck . We'll also talk about exporting each of your files and proofing them. So the image that you see here on the screen this is the back to my oracle deck that I created. And it is an Oracle deck that I created specifically for artists, and I decided that I wanted to create paint my own image, and so that's what I did, and I scanned it in, and this will be the back to all of my cards. Now you do have the option when you're working with make playing cards dot com, you can have the same image for the backs of all your cards, or you can have a different image for the backs of all your cards. It's entirely up to you. It's just, um, something you need to think about and have prepared before you begin uploading and something else to know that these decks you could be making, um, you could make a deck for anything. You could make your own playing cards. You can make Oracle cards, tarot cards, gain cards any anything goes. This process will be the same for pretty much anything. Sky is the limit. So back to this this is the back of my card. This is something that you should be making for your deck. Something else to consider would be on about the creator cord. And I've got a little bit of a bio here. I have my Web address and where you can find me on social media, and I think that's very important toe Have. Make sure you have all of this information, uh, on one of your cards and if not on a card, at least the back of the bucks. Something else that I've added is an instruction card. Now you'll find that most Oracle Decks and Tero decks they come with an instruction book. My Oracle deck is very easy to use. It is basically shuffle and pick your card for your message, and I felt that it didn't need an instruction book. But by all means. If you If you feel that you want to sit down and write an instruction book or you're creating a game and you feel like you're Deck needs an instruction book, they do offer that option. It will be an added cost, though. Toe add an instruction book to your deck, so those are a couple of things to keep in mind as well. So the next thing we're going to do, we're gonna talk a little bit about how do you export thes? And it's super easy. Once you have made sure that you're good with everything, everything looks great. You check your spelling. You've gone through each one of your cards and made sure that your text is within the safe area that you have a bleed that goes all the way out to the edges. The next step will be to export each one of thes, and it is a little bit tedious to export them. Ah, one at a time. But I will say that it gives you the opportunity to look at your card one more time, and I have done this and then gone back and made changes after I printed them out, because I guarantee you you will see something on the cards that you wouldn't see on the screen. When you print them out. It gives you kind of ah, little bit of a fresh perspective So what you going to do is you're just gonna look at each one of your cards when you're ready to export it, right? Click on it, Go up too quick, Exporters Ping PNG and make sure that you have a folder set up. I have a final cards PNG file, and this is where I've saved all of my final copies. Click Save and I'm just gonna put That is a two click save, and that's it. There's no dialogue box that comes up, so it's really quick. Now, if you've decided that you would rather save yours is a J peg or a GIF file, then you can still you can right click and go up here and right underneath it says Export as and you'll get a dialog box that pops up and you'll have all of your options here so you can choose your file settings over here, and you can change the campus eyes, the image size. You can shrink it if you want. You can do. You have all sorts of options here. I find that doing a quick export, um, works just great, and it also will save you a lot of time So the next thing we're gonna dio is set all of this up so that we can print out a contact sheet and the contact sheet looks like this. And yes, I plan on printing out each one of thes, and as you can see, it looks like a lot of work to go in and place each one of these individual cards. And really, it's not the easiest way to do this. Once you've created your folder for your cards, your final final PNG files, you'll go into file, automate and click contact sheet, too. So in this dialog box opens. What you'll need to do is select the folder where your cards are located, and if you have any sub folders, you'll need to check mark include sub folders. Mind does not. I have just a separate folder for all of my final cards. Then you'll need to go down here and select the size document that you're working with. Now I know I'm going to print this out on an 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper, so that's what I've put here. I've left the color profile alone because this is just for, um proofing. I did check. Flatten all layers. It will make the process go a little bit faster. Don't worry, it won't change anything over here now for the thumbnails. I know that my cards are 3.5 by five inches, and I want them to print out as close to the rial size as I can get them now, printing them out small so that their each, you know an inch by two inches, isn't it won't do you any good because you won't be able to see the card as it should be when it's printed. So I figured out that for my cards that I can fit for to a sheet. So that's what I have selected here under columns. I've got two columns and two rows, and that will give me a total of four, and that will get them as close to the rial size as possible. They're probably print just a little bit bigger. I've checked marches, auto spacing, and if you don't you can make. If you don't want to do that, you can increase the sizing here. And this is just another way that you can get the cards closer to their exact sighs. I don't find that to be necessary so you can also check Mark rotate for best fit. Mine are all portrait, so I know that they'll fit two by two across the page just fine. Now, down here, you have use file. Name is caption. I don't use that at all because it's not. I don't have so many files that I need to reference them for any reason. We all have folders built as groups in one document file. So I don't need to check mark this, and it also slows down this entire process anyway, So once you click, OK, just let it do its saying it'll take probably about five minutes for it to go through and create all of the's contact sheets for you. Now what you can do with ease, you can go file. You can either export these as a PdF file, or you can save these as a J peg. I would probably save them as a J peg and just make your selection down here and then save your file. And once everything is saved in your folder, then you can go ahead and print out. You can go ahead and print out all of the's sheets. So that's one way to view your cards and proof them at the closest size that you can get. And it's super quick to do, and I would suggest doing that. But I do have another method that you can use, and this will get you even closer to the actual size of the card, including the rounded edge. And it will give you a better feel for whether or not your cards are, um, have the correct bleed on them and also how things work together within the safe area. If you've. If you've put everything together in a cohesive way, you'll have a really good grasp of what your cards we're gonna look like. If you do it this way and this will be in Illustrator, and we will go ahead and talk about that in the next lesson, I'll give you a quick run down how to create these proof sheets and illustrator. If you're not interested in doing that, you can feel free to skip that part and move right on to the final part of this class 6. Illustrator Proofing: So here we are in Adobe Illustrator, and I want to show you really quickly how I created my proof sheets. I did not use the contact sheet method in Photoshop. It's a lot quicker than what we'll be doing here. But the nice thing about this is that it gives you the exact, um, dimensions of your card and exactly what they will look like when they're printed. So there won't be any question as to the bleed. And whether you're wording in your texts and your images are in the safe area, this will. This will be exact. So the first thing we'll need to do is create a new document. So goto file new, and I'm gonna work on an 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper, which is what this is, says letter. I'm gonna leave all of the settings alone. I'm I'll be working in an RGB color space at 300 d. P. I. And it'll be portrait and I'll click create. So here we have our art board and I'm I'm gonna set up the template first and then we'll create multiple art board. So let's say that you have 40 cards that you're creating. I know that four cards will sit on here, so we'll need to create 10 art boards, and then we'll save this entire file as a PdF, and then we'll print it out. And you can save this as a master document before you begin placing your images in. That way, if you plan on making several decks, you can use this template then to, um, proof other decks. And you won't ever have to set this up again as long as you're using the exact same size card. So we're gonna go over here and select the rectangle to tool and click over here one time so that can bring up this dialogue bucks. You can type in the exact measurements, and our cards are 3.5. Make sure you type in inches five inches and there's your rectangle. Now. I don't know the exact dimension of the ah, the cut on the corners, but I'm gonna grab one of these little circles. Click on a pull in a little bit until it looks just about right to me. I'm gonna go with something like that Now. This is the exact size of the card. And when I place my image in here, I mean, I'm gonna create a clipping mask within this, but I need to know. I need to know how large to make my image when we know that it's an eighth of an inch on either side. So what I'm gonna do is create another box that sits on top of this so that I have a guide when I place my images. So I'll do that by doing the exact same thing. Except this is gonna have the eighth of an inch added in on either side. So it will be 1/4 of an inch three point 75 inches by five and 1/4 inches and click OK, and I didn't type in inches on that. So we'll try that again. Okay, so this is 3.75 inches by 5.25 inches. There we go over here and click on my move tool, and I'll drag this up now to get these perfectly aligned. What you can do is select. Now, you can see when I buy drug this over here that my other box disappeared. And that's because this one has a Phil and I need to go over here and select no, Phil. And that way that will help me see both cards. This one also has a Phil. I want to make sure that that doesn't either. I just want these boxes toe have a stroke around them. So with both of thes selected click one and you can hold down the control key and click the other. I'm sorry, the shift key and click the other, or you can just drag and select them both come appeared to your align. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna ally a line to selection instead of the art board, and I'm gonna click the horizontal line and the vertical align. So now we have them perfectly aligned with each other, which is exactly what we want now, with them both selected. I'm gonna move this up here where I want it. I'm gonna hold down the key, and you can see that arrow kind of doubles up, and I'm gonna click, and I'm gonna drag over to make a duplicate copy of this. I'm going to select both of these and we do the same thing when I click hold my own key down, and I'm gonna drag and make a duplicate copy of those so that we have our first our first art board and you won't see when we place our image. You won't see the inner black line, but you will still see the outer black line, which is fine, and you can go back in and delete those if you don't want them to print out. So what we'll do is we'll duplicate this art board, and I'll duplicate this another nine times. Let's say you've got 40 card, so I know I need 10 art board. So click on your our board, fly out here and make sure this is highlighted and click on the menu in the corner of the hamburger and we're gonna click duplicate our boards. Now I'm just gonna keep going in here and duplicating these I don't see, and we can rearrange these because when Illustrator is doing is it's it's dropping these right next to each other, and it makes it difficult to see. But you couldn't you have the ability to rearrange these so through that another a few times, so we have 10. Our boards now and we can rearrange these by clicking on the menu and click Rearrange all our boards And I can tell it how many columns I want, how far apart I want them and how I wanted to arrange them. And because I have nothing in these yet it doesn't matter, obviously which one of these? You know, I select. So I'll just click, OK? And you can see it will arrange them like this for you. Now, you can go and save this as a template or you could just save, um, just save it as a separate file and call it, um, you know, 3.5 by five card template proof templates, something like that. But I'm gonna go right in here. And let's say I've already saved This is a template so that I can keep certain so that I can keep This is a master document, So I'm just gonna go in here and start dropping in my images. And once you get this whole set up, it goes pretty quickly. So I go into file place. We couldn't find that there for a second. Okay, I'll select Ah, an image and I'm going to start up in the upper left hand corner of the Outer Bucks and I'll click once and drag and it'll snap to that bucks and with its still selected right click on it, go down to arrange and go send to back now when I need to do is I need toe Also select this inner I'm gonna click off somewhere over here I need to select this inner path So click that and I'm also gonna hold down the shift key and click my image. Now I'm gonna right click again and then go make clipping mask And that is exactly what my card will look like printed. So I'll just repeat that process again. Over here on this, around the place we'll select another image. I'll go right up here to this corner. I'll click and dragged down till it snaps while it's highlighted. Right Click Goto arrange and you don't want to send it back. Word you want to send it all the way to the back. Sending it backward will only send it back one step, depending on how many objects you have. You want to send it all the way to the back. I'll click off. Select my path, hold down my shift key and select my image. Right click and make clipping mask, and I'll just continue this process until I have my entire deck. So oh, click and drag now, as you can see here, something's going on. That's a little odd. It looks like my image is for some reason, not the same size as it should be. And this is what happens when you're in photo shop and you've pulled the background out of your, um, image and you've forgotten toe actually place a white Phil behind this photo shop. When you save it as a PNG file, it will resize it depending on the transparency that you have behind the rest of it. Your text in your images and this is a good indicator that that's that's what's happened. So if you've pulled a background out of one of your cards and you forgot to lay in a fill a white Phil behind it, it's not going to match up. It'll be a different sizes. You can see right here it's much bigger. So I'm gonna delete that, and I'm pretty sure that that one yes, you can see I've got two of these, and this one should be the correct, and that one is correct. So that one has the white Phil behind it. Go to arrange, send back, and I'll select my path. Make clipping mask. I will just continue this process until we have all of our proof A lover proof sheets set up and then file. I usually save everything as a pdf file. And once this dialog box comes up, this is a setting that I usually use safe. Pdf. So this is what you have when it opens. And I don't feel the need to, um, delete these black lines. It's fine for me. So this is one of the look like when you print it out, and it will give you a very clear idea of what your cards will look like when you have them actually published. So hopefully there won't be any surprises when you get your cards back. That's the intention behind proofing these. Make sure you do give these to somebody else because I guarantee you when you look at something long enough Ah, you don't see things anymore, So give it somebody that has, you know, with a fresh pair of eyes they can. They can look everything over and help you do your spell check and that kind of thing. So from this point, what we'll do is we'll go back to make playing cards dot com, and I'll show you how to upload your files there and you'll be good to go. 7. Uploading Cards: So here we are back and make playing cards stuck. Come, and I'll go ahead and show you here how we're gonna upload our cards and the different options that you have as far as your bucks and also your instruction booklet. So I'm gonna click on game cards here at the top, and I'll scroll down until I find our jumbo cards. Here we go. During 1/2 by five, I'll click on that. And here you'll see all of the different options. And this is totally up to you. Ah, I did order the standard smooth, and it is actually a very nice finish. It's It's just like a, um a deck of playing cards for this purpose. I'm just gonna leave this a 21 cards. I'm gonna leave everything the same, except for the packaging, just so that I can show you how I set up my my box. So when you click on the drop down, you'll see that you can get it shrink wrapped and you can get all of the's plane packaging options, which won't have any artwork on it. And when you go down here to custom, this is where you can customize each one of thes with your own artwork, and each one of thes will have a separate template. And if you know how to do one, you'll know how to do the rest of them. So we'll go ahead and select custom rigid box, because that's how I set mine up. And I can show you what I did with my ah template. This is where you would download your box file. So go ahead and click on that and save it somewhere in your Oracle file and then booklets. You have the option of adding your instruction booklet, and you have the Byfuglien dizzy fold and an accordion, and I did not include an instruction booklet or anything in mind. I just wrote a very brief description on one of the cards, which is also an option. But if you do choose to add an instruction book, it will increase the price of your cards. And if you click details, you can kind of go through here and see a breakdown of what these instruction inserts will look like. All of the details in the specs that you need how to do, um, a little tutorial, which is nice. And then you have all of the specs as faras the bleed goes So you would set this up pretty much the same way in photo shop and just add your images If you plan on doing a custom instruction insert, I like I said, I didn't include that with mine. So we're just gonna go ahead and, um, move on. So I'm gonna go ahead and click. Start your design. Now, you do have the option at make playing cards of just uploading an image and then going through their designer and adding the text on top. That's not what we did. What we did is we built our entire deck in photo shop, including the text, so we'll just be uploading an image and skipping this text part on both the front and the back. So it says here I've got because I selected my max number of cards and I believe the options are 2140 40 something 63. And so my deck that I just had published was 52 cards, so I would select the max 63 then in this space here I would type in 52 cards so Let's say that our deck is actually only 18 cards and we've got our custom rigid box selected. And so, too is what we're gonna put on our card front. It's up to you whether you want to call which which side you want to call the front, which one you call the back. I'm going to say that the card fronts are a single image. So I'm gonna select same image for all fronts, and this is what will pop up and a quick upload images. And I will find my Oracle Deck Final Images folder and I will select my I know that said card back it really it doesn't matter. Either way. Front door back, however, you wanna, um, annotate that. So it'll upload this image to this little bitty library, and then you'll need to click and drag it over, and you can just open up. You could just open up your folder as well and and just drag it over from your folder, which is what will probably be doing in the next section. So this looks good to me. Everything looks great. If I've uploaded the wrong file, you can remove it, and you can also edit it. And I won't be editing within their system simply because all of our cards that we designed were done in photo shop. So I'm good with that, and I'm gonna click next step. I don't want my card fronts toe have any text on them. So I'm gonna go ahead and skip this part, and I'm gonna just go move right on to next step our next. Our next option here is the card backs and all of our card backs. They'll have different images, so we'll click on different images and it will open up this with 18 cards. And this would be a good point to save your project. So I'm gonna type, in example, and I'll click Save and my design has been saved. So, like I said, you can dragon image here, or you can go ahead and select several images and drag them over. Now, this will take a few minutes to complete. Once all of your images have uploaded in this little library, you can double click on these and it will drop it right into the card. Go to your next one double click. You can also drag and drop dragon drop. So once you have everything dropped in and you can go back up here and click next step and it will ask you if you want to add text. And we already have our text built into our images. So we're gonna click next step Now it's asking here which method I would like to use, and I'm gonna click the advanced option. And the easy option will just bring up the box template and it will only allow you I'll actually show you here. I will click the easy option and a quick submit. And this is the front of the box. So this is the the top, and then you also have the back of the box so you can actually go in and create basically another card in your in your Photoshopped file. That's the front of the box. But something to keep in mind is that you won't have anything on the sides. And I wanted my bucks toe have a wrapped kind of a feel. I wanted the artwork to go all the way around the bucks. I didn't want to leave these edges blank. So if you use the easy option the only the only part that's going to be filled is right here. And I can I can look, say go over here and open my library. This is a separate library, I guess, for the card for the card bucks. So let's say that I want to use this. I'm gonna use one of my cards so that I can show you that it'll fit right exactly on the top of this bucks. This won't be, um this is an option. Obviously, it's an easier option. But I will go in in the next lesson and show you how to create your custom box so I can just drag and drop this over here, and that will be the front of my box, which is fine. I mean, this is something that you could definitely do, and the back is pretty much the same thing. And this is where you would have a little synopsis about the deck, maybe a couple of little thumbnail pictures, and, um then you could just move on to the next step previewing and adding it to your cart. But this is not what we're going to do. We're gonna go back to the previous step. You also want to show you this. You have a little quick preview that you can click and it will bring all of the cards up if you want to take a look at them. But we don't really have Teoh study this because we've already made our proof sheet. We know that everything is good to go. She'll move on to customize books and I should get the same prompt again. No. Let's change our box options and do the advanced option click. OK, so you have the option of downloading your box template here. I've already downloaded mine from the first step. And when we're all done, this is where you will come back and upload your file. You can save your project right here and then just come back to it and in the next lesson will go over how to create your custom bucks. 8. Box Design: we are back here in Illustrator and I've opened up the pdf template for the custom rigid bugs. And don't let this scare you. Um, I wasn't the super excited about this template, but we can break this down and make it. Ah, really easy. And if you go over here and click on the layers, you'll see that you'll see the thes laters here that says hidden layers. This is everything that they've added. You can toggle these on and off if you don't want to see the text. We don't want to do that. We definitely want to keep our lines and stuff. And this layer up here is where you'll be adding your design. So you wanna make sure that that's selected when we upload or place our design in here. So the way that I did this, I went ahead and I dropped in a background image, an image that I wanted to cover the front and the sites. After that, I went in and placed another image that would be the top of the box on Lee and then in Illustrator, I added text to each side, and I did the same thing for the base of the Bucks except on the base. All I did was add in the background. I added in what would be on the back, and I didn't bother adding any text on each of these sides because the front of the box will cover that up. So it's not necessary. And I went into photo shop and I created a background based off of the background in my painting, and this is a little bit more advanced. I had to go in and, ah, use the clone tool and stitch things together to make the background pull out the hand that was in here. If you have a different background that you have in mind, just make it easy on yourself unless you know how to use Photoshopped than you could do something like this. But the size that this is at changes to interest, you concede this. I have this set at 7.2 and the height of 8.7, and the resolution is at 300 d. P. I. So I saved that as a PNG file, and I went in here and I placed that image and I didn't stretch this all the way across I did each one of thes, um, the top and bottom of the box separately. Now, when you do this, you won't be able to see your your template here. So we'll fix that in just a second to go into the corner and click and drag until you hit this red line over here. This is the edge of the top of the box, and you need to make sure that the artwork extends all the way out to that edge like that because that's the bleed. Let go and you'll see that's dropped right in there. And I'm just gonna grab this and duplicated and drag it over. Hit the old key and line it up. And it looks like this one could stand to be just a smidge bigger something and just bump this. There we go. You can do the same thing for this so that they're the same size. Scooch this over. Make sure that you're touching those outer edges. You don't wanna have any sort of Ah, a white line that you forgot. Now that we have these dropped in here, you can't see your template at all. So what you can do is go over to the layers panel and we're gonna take the hidden layer. We're going to click, and we're gonna drag it above our design. And so now we can't see our design It all so easy. Fix for this is to make sure that you've clicked this so that all of this later is selected and they were gonna go appear to window and we're going to select appearance, click on a pass ity We're gonna change the opacity to know about 20%. And we'll close out of all of this. No way. We can still see the template and are designed at the same time. And at the end, after we've built out our our box, we're gonna go ahead and delete their template anyway and save it is a pdf to upload to them. So now what you need to do is I'm gonna add in one of the cards that I created specifically for the top of this bucks. Just make sure, but before you do that, that you are on your design layer and it will add an image to the cover the front cover of the bucks and ah, file place and I will find the card that I created that I want to go on the front. Now you can see what I've done over here. I've added this on the wrong layer, So I'm gonna take this and click and drag until they get to my design and and I'm gonna dump it there. And that's why we couldn't see it very well. So that's an indicator. Keep that in mind. If you do something like that, you're wondering why you can't see it. Well, take a look over here and make sure that you're working on the right layer. So now that I'm on the correct layer, let's add in the let's add in the back of the card. And in my original box design, I created the back of the card, right? An illustrator. But if it's easier for you, you can just go right as you're creating your cards and photo shop. Just create the back of your card there because it will be the same size. So just for showing you for these purposes, I'm just gonna use the instruction card that I made and place them on the back. And it's nice because they fit exactly. So now we'll begin adding some of our text on thesis Ides of the boxes and you'll notice the front of my box does not have any text. And that's because I just used one of the cards that I had in my PNG file. And I would suggest that when you're creating your cards that you also create the front and the back. Since you're already doing it, you may as well create the front and the back of the box. If you choose the rigid box option and then you won't have to worry about creating the text in Illustrator, it will already be there when you drop in your image. You will, however, need to create the text for the top sides of the books and I'll show you how we go about doing that. I'll click the text tool and I'll just click anywhere. Animal. Leave it just at this text and I'm gonna change the font here, man. I'm gonna pick something, pick something like this, and I'm gonna make sure that I have the stroke on. Ellen turned the Phil well with I'm click off anywhere so that I can look at my text, and I'm gonna zoom in groups, consume out just a little bit. Get my move, tool Something else. I wanted to show you real quick. When you're working with your text, you want to make sure that you're not You're not gonna move around the template in the background so you can go over here to the hidden layer. And I believe I accidentally put my text on that layer. No, I guess I didn't. Okay, there it is, right there. Anyway, what you want to do is I'm gonna collapse this this hidden later that sitting on the top of our design, that's that we've made really transparent. We don't want a chance moving that or shifting it around because we want to make sure everything is placed correctly so you can go right appear to the layers panel and you cantata Gle the luck on that way, we can make sure that nothing moves. So go back here and click on my text. And as you can see, gives you the orientation right here. And I want to make sure that I do that correctly. So I'm gonna rotate my text. I'm gonna hold the shift key down while I do that so that it snaps. And then I can just drag this over here and the way that I would do this, I would hold down the old key to make a duplicate copy, and I would drag it across, and then I'll do the same thing. I'll wait until I get the curved arrow, hold down my shift key and flip this around this way. Then I'm gonna make sure this is selected. And I'm also gonna select this. I want to make sure that these two are lined up with each other correctly so I can go over here to my align and make sure that align to selection is selected. And I want to make sure that we're aligning this with the centers and that looks pretty good. And I kind of eyeball where, you know, they're placed within this rectangle. And I think I'm gonna move this one out with my arrow keys just a little bit. I will do the same thing for the top, which is the right side and the left side. It's like my text tool. We will place this right here, and then I will hit my old key to make a duplicate copy and drag this down. And I need to spend this one around because, as you can see underneath, that should be upside down. So we'll wait till I get my little curved arrows. Hit the shift key and flip it around and make sure this is selected shift. Click this one so they're both selected. We're gonna a line the centers click off somewhere. Take a look at the positioning may bump this down a little bit, and that's that's really it up in. The last thing that you want to do is you want to outline all of your text, so select all of your text. We'll go up to type and then we'll select create outlines. And basically, what it does is it turns your text into, um, image. So that's pretty much it. Make sure that your text is outlined that your front and your back are lined correctly in here, and the last thing that we need to do is go into the layers panel and will select the hidden later insurance highlighted and drag it down to the trash can. And that's it. So now we'll save this you can save it is it was trader file and then go back in and save it as a pdf and we'll use example and just leave this preset save. PdF, and it should pop up here. So this is the file that will be sent to them for the front and the back of your books. And I can show you what mine look like when I was all done with it. So this is the front in the back of my bucks that I created. And as you can see over here, I just used their template to add in some text. And then I went and I placed these little pictures in here. The little thumbnails and only did is go up to file and place, and then I just click, drag and then go on to the next one. I used my align tool to make sure that all of these were aligned with each other properly. I added a little bit more text here on the bottom, and I added a copyright to it, also saying that the design and the artwork is copyright are by Monica, and that's pretty much it. Make sure that you put your name on the front of your box to save it is a pdf, and then we'll upload this and make playing cards dot com. So we're back here at make playing cards and I'm gonna click upload file. We're going to our box holder. I'll click my box file open, and they will also accept illustrator files and Photoshopped files, and then we can click safe. You'll notice the little tip here at the bottom, and the next step is to preview your entire deck and then add it to the cart. And you have to make sure that you click this check box here that says that all of the designs are correct and that you own all of the copyrights or you have authorization to use them. You don't want to write the company back and tell them that there's a spelling error when in fact, the spelling errors on your end. So just make sure you click the little check box. We're gonna add it to the cart. So once you've added the deck to the card and I do suggest ordering one deck for yourself, it will be more expensive than ordering Ah, bulk amount of cars. You'll get that bulk discount if you order um, more cards. But I would suggest ordering one for yourself so that you can take a good look at it. See if you're happy with the quality. And if there any changes that you want to make in regard to the card stock or the finishing or the packaging. That's your opportunity to do that before you offer them for sale, whether you're selling them on their marketplace or if you were carrying your own inventory and then they'll ask if you need any of thes and that's pretty much it, and then you go to check out and you've just created your first Oracle deck. 9. Final Product: So here we are. And I wanted to show you the finished product from make playing cards dot com. It's super exciting to get these back in the mail to see something that you've created in your hands as a physical product. It's it's at least for me. It's super exciting. So here is our custom box design that we did, and you can see how it wraps all the way around. And it looks nice and neat, and we have all of our text going around the box and you can see that I added in text in Illustrator after the fact. And here's the back of the bucks and it's wrapped inside. So it's it's really nice and the boxes constructed based on the number of cards that you have. So here are the cards. They're finished, and I couldn't be happier with the quality of thes and from somebody that has several Oracle decks that I've purchased in Tero Decks. Um, being able to shuffle these I have my hands are kind of small, and I can't There are a lot of decks that are too thick because they've used such that card stock that I I can barely shuffle the cards. So for me, that was like one of the really important things. I had to be able to shovel these cards, and they're nice and flexible there. They're easy to bend and they're even easy to shuffle this way. So okay, and I'll show you some of these. The quality is is really good. I'm super happy with how everything came out. And I do want to say to that, Obviously, this class is for more than just creating Oracle decks. You can create any kind of deck that you want if you have a game system that you've always wanted to publish. Or maybe you have a special set of playing cards that you want to create as a wedding favor . That's really super personalized. I mean, the possibilities are really endless. You can even create your own Tero deck. It just goes on and on. You can create a deck that has nothing to do with with the game. Or you could just put images of your family on this and create a gift for your family for Christmas. Um, which is something I might be doing, and that's pretty much it for this class. I hope you enjoyed it and I can't wait. See what? You guys come up with us. Faras your deck designs and be sure to post them in the project section. Even if you just post one of your cards, that would be great for everybody to see. I will have another class that's available. If you are more interested in creating a handmade deck, we'll talk mostly about the artwork that goes on the card. So we'll be playing with watercolor and mixed media. And that kind of thing will be creating a handmade oracle deck that you can give to somebody or is just something that you can keep for yourself. And that class is also available here on skill share. I really appreciate you guys tuning, and I hope you have a lot of fun creating your own decks. And if you're interested in this muse deck, you can find it at art By Monica dot com.