I recently decided it was time to show off all the Magic sets I have, so I've been planning how to transition them from the cardboard boxes they're store in now to 3-ring binders I can put on a bookshelf. The problem is that I don't want to have just black binders; I want the binders themselves to look good. Wizards of the Coast used to make this type of thing for people who collected sets, but they stopped several years before I got back into Magic. I searched the Internet a bit, but I couldn't find anything that suited my purposes, so this left me to my own devices for getting good looking binders for my cards.

I've dabbled with Photoshop in the past, but since I gave up my software pirating days, playing with that was out of the question. For a free solution I turned to Gimp for my image manipulation needs.

Now I make no claims as to my proficiency with image editing, but I'm pretty happy with what I've accomplished so far. (happy enough to post about it here it seems) So without further ado, I give you what I've accomplished so far:

What I started with:

(a scan of the side of a box of cards from the set)

And the two pieces of art I've pulled from this:

The cool part that you can't see here is that I have both of these in high enough resolution that I'll be able to print them on a full size sheet of paper and they will still look good.

I have a long way to go, but I'm pleased with what I've accomplished so far and wanted to share.