Mortalpawn
Two Pair
After procuring two of my favorite GOAT chip sets: the Big Top Poker and Vineyards in cards mold, I wanted to add another of my favorite sets: PNY. The history of the PNY casino is quite interesting, and you can read more about it in this excellent history of PNY post by @Irish.
Developing a cards mold tribute for PNY turned out to be difficult. I had to develop the artwork entirely from scratch. Suitable images had to be found that might be reasonably close to the originals. There was no exact match for the font. The artwork itself is very complex with multistage gradients on just about every element.
The cards mold format itself posed challenges. They are not designed for "grand" size inlays. I'm not a fan of smooth ceramics, so I wanted to use cards mold, but the molded ring and cards indents limited the size of pictures and elements. I wanted to make the picture inlays as large as possible so I measured my chips with a caliper and pushed it to the very edge. I could not find any examples of pictures printed on cards mold, so I contacted Tina who send me a single picture of someone who tried it, but the results looked mixed. There was loss of resolution, and as expected the card inlays would distort the text in small ways.
While its impossible to match the original set exactly, I did procure pictures from stock image sites that match up reasonably well. Some tradeoffs were made - for example the $500 denom had to be moved down on that chip as otherwise it would cover the twin towers. Many other small compromises were made, but it is a tribute set.
The $0.25 chip is an invention of my own, based partly off the BCC 0.25/0.50 chips printed in a long ago group buy. I went with a medium blue to avoid dirty stack issues, and a picture of Times Square for the inlay. The dealer buttons I also made from scratch - it has a picture of Grand Central station. The $1000 is in 43mm of course!
Even after finishing the artwork, I was not sure this set would work at all, but I decided the only way to find out was to print a set. So I did that and the results are below. I did make one major mistake - I printed a single barrel of $20 with the wrong inlay color (it was too orange), but I've corrected this in the artwork below.
The final chips came out better than I had hoped. As expected there was some loss of resolution on the images, and distortion of the outer ring text from the cards mold inlays, but it was otherwise outstanding. Two of my favorites are the $1000 chip in 43mm and the red $5 which just look great. I may even add a few more in the future.
Here's my starting artwork (with a corrected $20):
Developing a cards mold tribute for PNY turned out to be difficult. I had to develop the artwork entirely from scratch. Suitable images had to be found that might be reasonably close to the originals. There was no exact match for the font. The artwork itself is very complex with multistage gradients on just about every element.
The cards mold format itself posed challenges. They are not designed for "grand" size inlays. I'm not a fan of smooth ceramics, so I wanted to use cards mold, but the molded ring and cards indents limited the size of pictures and elements. I wanted to make the picture inlays as large as possible so I measured my chips with a caliper and pushed it to the very edge. I could not find any examples of pictures printed on cards mold, so I contacted Tina who send me a single picture of someone who tried it, but the results looked mixed. There was loss of resolution, and as expected the card inlays would distort the text in small ways.
While its impossible to match the original set exactly, I did procure pictures from stock image sites that match up reasonably well. Some tradeoffs were made - for example the $500 denom had to be moved down on that chip as otherwise it would cover the twin towers. Many other small compromises were made, but it is a tribute set.
The $0.25 chip is an invention of my own, based partly off the BCC 0.25/0.50 chips printed in a long ago group buy. I went with a medium blue to avoid dirty stack issues, and a picture of Times Square for the inlay. The dealer buttons I also made from scratch - it has a picture of Grand Central station. The $1000 is in 43mm of course!
Even after finishing the artwork, I was not sure this set would work at all, but I decided the only way to find out was to print a set. So I did that and the results are below. I did make one major mistake - I printed a single barrel of $20 with the wrong inlay color (it was too orange), but I've corrected this in the artwork below.
The final chips came out better than I had hoped. As expected there was some loss of resolution on the images, and distortion of the outer ring text from the cards mold inlays, but it was otherwise outstanding. Two of my favorites are the $1000 chip in 43mm and the red $5 which just look great. I may even add a few more in the future.
Here's my starting artwork (with a corrected $20):
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