A couple of weeks ago, my friend Paul, KW1L, sent me a scan of the QSL card below, and asked, “Any advice on how I can make the same QSL card as the attached file with my calls and address?”
Paul had tried contacting N0IU to see where he’d gotten the QSL card, but found out that, unfortunately, Scott had recently passed away. Knowing that I created my own QSL card designs, he asked for my help.
Now, this design is really simple, but without the artwork used to create it, coming up with a new design would be a bit more difficult. I can manipulate images, but I’m not very good at creating original artwork.
Another interesting complication is that the image of the operator is ripoff of a cartoon created by Phil Gildersleeve, W1CJD, or simply “Gil,” whose illustrations graced the pages of QST for more than 40 years. It was a good try, but lacks the character of the original Gil drawing. Since I wanted to use the original, rather than this ripoff, I asked Paul to inquire as to whether the image was still copyrighted and if he could use it. Paul did inquire and did get permission to use it.
Next, Paul found a CD of ham radio clip art with this image on the disk. He brought it over and I got to work. The first think I noticed is that the Gil cartoon only includes half the table. So, I did a little copying and pasting and was able to create the other half of the table as seen on the N0IU QSL card.
The next thing I did was to paste the image of the tower from the N0IU card onto the new KW1L card. I didn’t like that very much, though. The image of the tower is even more crudely drawn than the image of the operator. So, I made my own tower. As simple as they may seem, the radio waves emanating from the tower proved to be the hardest part. First, I had to get the shape just right. Then, I had to copy them, rotate them, make the background invisible, and then fit the rotated images onto the tower image. The final QSL card is shown below.
Although I’m not a great artist, I think that the tower (and the entire card) looks pretty good. Let me know what you think. If you’d like the TIFF file, let me know, and I’ll send it to you. (It’s a little more than 5 Mbytes).
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