Today I thought I would try something much different. With J.J. Abrams taking on the Star Wars franchise, I’ve been revisiting my passion for space opera. Back in 1978, I’d started drawing spaceships with my friends and kept up the habit until freshman year in College. Back then, we didn’t have the digital production tools that we have now. I got to wondering what I’d be doing today, in 2013, if I was still into spaceships. With I was a kid, I spent a lot of time organizing and filing my spaceships on paper after I drew them, classifying them into 7 different periods of development.

As a valentine to my youthful spaceship-crazed self, I made a 3×5″ index card with a new spaceship on it. It took about 30 minutes to sketch, and 90 minutes get my ancient scanner to work because there are no drivers for Windows 8 64-bit; I ended up hooking it up on the Mac and then transfer the source assets—scans of the spaceship, some old graph paper, and the cardboard pattern—to my desktop PC. Then, about 2 hours to work the spaceship art into something simple that still evoked some excitement. The design isn’t the greatest, but I am pretty sure I would have been thrilled to get something like this in 1979 from FUTURE DAVE, and I’d have been inspired to print trading cards to barter for strategic alliances in Home Room and the Galaxy beyond…

» Download Spaceship Trading Index Card PDF

Happy Valentines Day, fellow space nerds!

Adobe Acrobat Reader is recommended for printing. The built-in "Mac OS X Preview" and "Chrome Browser" PDF viewers do not always draw dotted lines correctly.

Enjoy!