Snapshot Oracle

SpiritOfTheDogz

Yes it's a funny name but it's the best i could come up with :)
I decided to have a look through all the snaps I've taken over the past 7 or 8 years when we've been on holiday or out with the dogs etc, and I wondered if there would be any that could be used as an oracle.
So I sorted through 1000's of pictures and found 45 that I believed would be up to the task which I'm in the process of having printed.


Working on what they mean to me was a lot more difficult than I expected and not all the cards turned out with the meanings I first thought of.

Not sure how well they'll work, it'll be a case of having a "play" with them and seeing how they perform :D


http://smg.photobucket.com/user/NEELIX1/slideshow/Divination/Snapshot
 

AJ

well done, and great original photography
 

Lee

Very nice, well-chosen! I'll be interested to see what you come up with for meanings.
 

SpiritOfTheDogz

The whole idea of making the Snapshot Oracle was not that one day it would be picked up by a publisher and become a mainstream deck, it was because i wanted a deck more personal to ME and I wanted to "try" and show that it's something most people can do if you put your mind to it with very limited IT skills or expensive programs.
It isn't perfect and now I've had it printed (links to the cards below) I can see where it can be improved and that is that I need to use the pictures at a greater resolution and the numbers on the cards aren't all that visible but I'm pleased with what I have got for just a few hours work (about six or seven) and less than £10 printing and postage.
Despite the printing firm not being a specialised card printing place they have come out pretty well. Card stock a little thin but I've certainly had a lot worse and the corners are square and not rounded but hey, what do you want for a tenner?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v478/NEELIX1/Divination/Snapshot/Clipboard04_zpsaydq0sup.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v478/NEELIX1/Divination/Snapshot/Clipboard05_zpsnxw7gtna.jpg
 

Uma

The whole idea of making the Snapshot Oracle was not that one day it would be picked up by a publisher and become a mainstream deck, it was because i wanted a deck more personal to ME and I wanted to "try" and show that it's something most people can do if you put your mind to it with very limited IT skills or expensive programs.

Hi SpiritOfTheDogz,

I absolutely love this idea and would like to follow your process of making it personal. I created my own deck years ago and that was a tremendous learning experience and, like you, one that I would encourage others to do also. I would love to know how you are going about it, what the challenges are for you and anything else you'd care to share. I'm actually thinking of running a personalized oracle creation workshop so I'm looking into how all kinds of people would approach making a deck that is personal to them.

Good luck with it!
Uma
 

SpiritOfTheDogz

OK I'll try and explain how I went about it as simple as possible. I didn't use any expensive programs just a few free editing programs really.

First off i went through every file on my PC to find any suitable images, you get to know what are suitable, they like speak to you as you're looking at them. For me i avoided people pictures for the simple reason I didn't want family of friends be whatever I looked at when i did a reading.

Once I selected enough images I then decided what could be used in portrait orientation and disregarded the rest. This was quite tough as i wanted some landscape style pictures and what I wanted didn't always look right in portrait. Even now I'm not happy with some but i had to make the best of what i had.

The next step was to use an editing program, I used Irfanview, to make sure all the pictures were of the same ratio. I think I used 4:5

I then used paint.net for more editing so I got a blank canvass in paint.net of the size of the same ratio, and pasted the pictured into it before adding a png file of the chosen border which I searched Google for.
While using paint.net this is probably a good time to add the numbers and or names if you are using them, but be careful where they are placed, I had a problem with the number obscuring the image too much if it went where I intended so had to play a round a bit.

I saved the framed pictures as png files but I think it would have worked the same if I had saved as jpg.

I then had to make a back, how you do this is entirely up to you but I opened openoffice.org draw and made the background the colour I wanted, which was a gradient. I saved this as a jpg and pasted into paint.net
Next I looked on Google for some squiggly lines of the colour I wanted and found some in png file format which I could then combine with the background image in paint.net and save again as a png file.

Next I opened openoffice.org word document and made the page size I wanted the cards before pasting the cards page by page into the document. As printing would be reverse side printing it was necessary to make sure every other page was a back, so it went card 1 picture on page one and a back on page 2, card 2 on next page followed by another back etc. this means for however many cards you have you will have twice as many pages which are then saved as PDF.

Next step was to upload the pdf to the online printers I was using, fileprint.org and set the parameters how i wanted like standard card stock and gloss finish and reverse printing. within two day they were back with me. OK so they don't have rounded corners but the card stock is good enough and they work pretty well for around £10 printed plus 6 or 7 hours PC time.
 

Uma

I meant your thinking process, not the technical process.
 

Lee

Hi SpiritOfTheDogz, thanks for posting such an in-depth description of your printing process, I found it very interesting!

Uma, SpirtOfTheDogz discusses her conceptual process earlier in the thread.