I needed a frac for my mixed plastic set and figured it was a good excuse to try my hand at designing a fantasy chip, buy some plastic to relabel, and work with Gear to get a great label printed.
Long ago I studied abroad in China and spent some time in Hong Kong. There's the 'island' of Hong Kong with the dramatic mountains rising up behind the skyline, and then the mainland which is separated by about a half-mile stretch of water. The "Star Ferry" is the cheap long-running ferry to take you across if you want one of the best urban views in the world - see this night crossing video:
I figured "Star Ferry" would make for a suitable Fantasy Casino premise so I tried to find the right image of the boat to work from. This mostly entailed watching videos of the boats and trying to grab the right frame to copy over into Photoshop.
Since these boats are fairly iconic I thought maybe some other sources would be easier to work with. This first one is straight from a graphic designer's website and while it looked great, I didn't really want to exactly copy someone else's work. Also I worried the details would be too fine for a label:
An illustration I think from a news segment about the ferry, again with details too fine:
And finally a video game model that someone made:
I was searching during the "Studio Ghibli" AI fad where people were turning photos into anime renditions using AI tools. I tried it and couldn't get anything too faithful to the real thing:
In the end I used the final image of the original six posted above. It was a fairly tedious process in photoshop to recreate it using just a couple solid colors in order to avoid printing issues with shades or transitions.
What followed was many hours of tinkering with naming, sizing the denomination, picking colors, moving everything around, changing fonts, etc. Not my specialty! Very tedious. In the future I'll work with a designer who could do this all 10x faster and more importantly better!
The final result is below.
Here's an earlier mockup using the other illustration showing some of the same ideas. I like it better in many ways, but alas I moved away from it mostly to avoid copying someone else's exact art.
I bought a rack of white Bud Jones vintage chips here on PCF, pulled the labels off, and found the chips weren't quite pearly white anymore. A bath in soap and scrubbing didn't help beyond removing the leftover adhesive. Some digging on PCF led to a method of leaving chips out in sunlight with gaseous hydrogen peroxide if I remember correctly. This has the effect of bleaching the whites back to how they should originally have appeared. Think of old computer cases that have gone all beige/yellow despite being white when new. Something about this chemical reaction reverses the coloring. I found it to be about half successful after trying many different ways, but found it also dulled the blue color which I didn't want to overdo. A fun experiment that I wouldn't recommend, and probably wouldn't do again given the so-so results and total effort required.
I placed on order with @Gear for one of their thicker laminated labels (I can't remember but would be happy to look up exactly what I got if anyone's interested). They were easy to stick on and that's the end of that!
I was worried that fine detail wouldn't come through but as you can see there's no problem making out even the finest details. See the tiny star on top of the smokestack for the smallest example.
Overall I'm happy with them. It was a fun process but was more work than I was expecting at every step. Removing 200 stickers while trying to be careful not to scratch the chip... tedious. Removing all the adhesive... tedious. Finding the right image... bleaching the chips... sticking the new labels on, etc.
So now they're my chips and nobody else has anything like them! And I can check off "acquire plastic fracs" from my treasure hunt list of hoped for acquisitions.
Happy to answer any questions folks might have
None of this would have been possible without all the archives of knowledge available here on PCF!
Long ago I studied abroad in China and spent some time in Hong Kong. There's the 'island' of Hong Kong with the dramatic mountains rising up behind the skyline, and then the mainland which is separated by about a half-mile stretch of water. The "Star Ferry" is the cheap long-running ferry to take you across if you want one of the best urban views in the world - see this night crossing video:
I figured "Star Ferry" would make for a suitable Fantasy Casino premise so I tried to find the right image of the boat to work from. This mostly entailed watching videos of the boats and trying to grab the right frame to copy over into Photoshop.
Since these boats are fairly iconic I thought maybe some other sources would be easier to work with. This first one is straight from a graphic designer's website and while it looked great, I didn't really want to exactly copy someone else's work. Also I worried the details would be too fine for a label:
An illustration I think from a news segment about the ferry, again with details too fine:
And finally a video game model that someone made:
I was searching during the "Studio Ghibli" AI fad where people were turning photos into anime renditions using AI tools. I tried it and couldn't get anything too faithful to the real thing:
In the end I used the final image of the original six posted above. It was a fairly tedious process in photoshop to recreate it using just a couple solid colors in order to avoid printing issues with shades or transitions.
What followed was many hours of tinkering with naming, sizing the denomination, picking colors, moving everything around, changing fonts, etc. Not my specialty! Very tedious. In the future I'll work with a designer who could do this all 10x faster and more importantly better!
The final result is below.
- Red Chinese characters that translate to "Star Ferry" and maaaaybe the origin/destination. I forget. I think it's just Star Ferry or something close enough. I had written it out in english and couldn't make it work
- Small white 25-cent denomination
- Boat artwork
- Text that is barely readable in the background, meant to act more as a backdrop than something to actually read. Sort of like the wall of logos behind celebrities at a red carpet event. It includes the origin and destination of the ferry route I used most. I tried to make "Hong Kong" and "Kowloon" be the most visible, acting as a sort of official location for the chip in lieu of putting writing "hong kong' at the bottom of the chip. Finally, this text has a gradient so it changes color across the chip from a sort of dusty rose into something grayer.
Here's an earlier mockup using the other illustration showing some of the same ideas. I like it better in many ways, but alas I moved away from it mostly to avoid copying someone else's exact art.
I bought a rack of white Bud Jones vintage chips here on PCF, pulled the labels off, and found the chips weren't quite pearly white anymore. A bath in soap and scrubbing didn't help beyond removing the leftover adhesive. Some digging on PCF led to a method of leaving chips out in sunlight with gaseous hydrogen peroxide if I remember correctly. This has the effect of bleaching the whites back to how they should originally have appeared. Think of old computer cases that have gone all beige/yellow despite being white when new. Something about this chemical reaction reverses the coloring. I found it to be about half successful after trying many different ways, but found it also dulled the blue color which I didn't want to overdo. A fun experiment that I wouldn't recommend, and probably wouldn't do again given the so-so results and total effort required.
I placed on order with @Gear for one of their thicker laminated labels (I can't remember but would be happy to look up exactly what I got if anyone's interested). They were easy to stick on and that's the end of that!
I was worried that fine detail wouldn't come through but as you can see there's no problem making out even the finest details. See the tiny star on top of the smokestack for the smallest example.
Overall I'm happy with them. It was a fun process but was more work than I was expecting at every step. Removing 200 stickers while trying to be careful not to scratch the chip... tedious. Removing all the adhesive... tedious. Finding the right image... bleaching the chips... sticking the new labels on, etc.
So now they're my chips and nobody else has anything like them! And I can check off "acquire plastic fracs" from my treasure hunt list of hoped for acquisitions.
Happy to answer any questions folks might have
None of this would have been possible without all the archives of knowledge available here on PCF!
