Wax-ing Nostalgic

I’m sure you’re well aware that there’s a growing trend of people trying to detach themselves from their phones.  As someone who has tried just about every major platform of social media since the MySpace days, I know I’ve found that my attention span has gone to hell as all I do anymore is scroll, scroll, scroll.  So, I’ve been finding ways to put my phone down – or at least stay off social media – in an effort to rewire my brain to become less reliant on that algorithm-designed dopamine hit.  One thing I’ve been doing instead is recreating the artwork from vintage trading card packages.

Back in October of this year, I was scrolling through Bluesky and came across a thread of people talking about Fright Flicks, a line of 90 trading cards and 11 stickers released by Topps in 1988 that featured scenes from popular horror movies of the time.  There were four wax paper wrappers (the paper gives old trading cards the nickname “waxpacks”) with artwork of Freddy Krueger, The Predator, Pumpkinhead, and Vampire Amy from Fright Night, drawn in a very distinct style that was common on old trading card packaging.

I was already looking for inspiration for a Halloween t-shirt design and I decided it would be cool to recreate the Freddy artwork.  I found a photo of the packaging online, brought it into Procreate, and simply began tracing it, using different layers to create the overlapping colors.  I was pretty happy with the results and thought it would be fun to do the rest of the Fright Flicks waxpack artwork (so far I’ve only finished Pumpkinhead, but the rest are in-process).  The next thing I knew I was scouring the web for waxpacks and spending hours of time recreating them.

And now…this is what I do most nights after everyone else is in bed.  I put on a podcast or maybe a Spotify playlist of instrumental music, sit on the couch under a blanket, and I trace old trading card packages.  On weekends, if I have spare time, I trace old trading card packages.  Instead of doomscrolling or watching silly TikToks for hours on end, I trace old trading card packages.  Whatever works, right?

Here’s a gallery of my recreations:

At first, I was really trying to recreate the packaging as closely as possible, halftone printing dots and all. I found a few Procreate brushes that mimicked the halftone aesthetic, but after some experimentation, I decided that I wanted to try to restore the spirit of the original artwork that was “ruined” by the cheap printing process. So, for now, I’ve opted to leave off the halftone look, in favor of simply filling in areas with solid color.  I could see me revisiting the idea of adding the printing dots in the future, though.

You can see in the image of C-3PO below, the one on the left is the original with the halftone dots, while my “cleaned up” version without the dots is on the right (and I just noticed I missed a white spot in the background! That’s going to haunt me for days…)(I fixed it the same night I published this post)

One aspect of the printing process that I have kept is the overlaps.  Halftone printing for illustration is accomplished by creating plates for each color, typically four – Yellow, Cyan, Magenta, and Black – and then putting them down one at a time, mixing the inks until the desired color is created.  Black is usually the last one printed as it outlines the artwork.  When I trace these packages, it’s essentially the same thing I’m doing with layers in Procreate, with the black outline being on top of all the colors.

Because these were just the packages that kids would immediately throw away once they tore them open, making sure that these separate color plates were perfectly aligned was not a priority for the printing company.  So, it’s not unusual for the plates to overlap, causing the black outline to be slightly off-centered from the colors. Sometimes, unintended colors could occur if two plates mix while the ink was still wet. For example, the green line around the outside of this Back to the Future II waxpack where the cyan background and the yellow plates mixed (you’ll also notice that the magenta seems a little off-center, too):

Sometimes these overlaps are barely noticeable, while other times they render the image barely recognizable.  Personally, I find these overlaps to be one of the most charming aspects of waxpack packaging, so recreating them is a priority for me.

The printer of these Simpsons cards didn’t line up the plates correctly at all.
Check out all the pink in Bart’s hair, the yellow on his teeth, and the show’s title is a mess! I love it!

Tracing these old waxpacks has become my new obsession at the moment.  I’m often searching online for new packs to draw with varying results.  I prefer tracing open packs because I’m able to see all of the artwork, but most of the time all I can find are sealed packs of cards.  Unfortunately, this means that I’m at the mercy of how the machine folded the wax paper over the cards forty years ago.  Sometimes the artwork is crooked or off-center, but the real problem is that the very nature of being wrapped around a 3-D stack of cards means that I’m not getting the whole image.  There are a few cards that I simply cannot find better photos of, so I’ve made do with what I have, sometimes taking the main artwork from one photo and then using a different photo for the text that shows what you’ll get inside each pack (i.e., 10 cards, 1 sticker, 1 stick of gum).  I’ve even considered getting a few of these hard-to-find packs off eBay just for the packaging.  I haven’t gone that route just yet, but I could see it happening soon.

One thing I want to mention about all of this is that I am fully aware that I’m not creating anything here.  I’m standing on the shoulders of giants, literally tracing someone else’s artwork.  That being said, I have put my website address on the artwork I’ve posted, simply so that people can come back here to find more if they happen upon one of these images online.  The website address would be easy to crop out or erase, so I’m not trying to watermark these images in some sort of attempt to get credit for them.  This is all just a way for me to unwind, to unplug, and appreciate the work of others who probably never got the credit they deserved.  I hope you’ll appreciate my recreations in a similar spirit.

Like I said, this is a new obsession for me, so I’ll probably be updating this post often with new designs.  Check back for more in the future!  And if you have a waxpack you’d like to see recreated, let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to make it happen!