New at Photoshop, looking to design hockey cards

[QuietCompany]

Hi, I never write these but think it's necessary here in order to get direction to the right forum and the right tutorials.

Anyways, I finally decided to open up Photoshop to design custom hockey cards. I like to get the base cards of the notable players plus the retired ones each season but noticed the problem that cards are never printed for retired players after their last season in most cases and they never show all their career stats so thought it'd be cool to do. I've found the program a bit tough so far and not as intuitive as I would have hoped but I've been using it for a couple weeks now and have improved a bit. I realize that I should have maybe gotten Illustrator because it's better at making designs but I feel this also serves my purpose and has a bigger community of course.

Anyways, I'd eventually like to make more complicated looking designs. There are quite a few people making these but a shocking lack of tutorials on the design aspect. The other difficulty I have is with printing and cutting these and making them look good, there's one tutorial available but it only shows putting them together when only the front is designed.

This is partly what I've done so far, inspired partly by old hockey cards and partly by my own ideas. Mainly recently retired players.:

The first one was designed using the only detailed tutorial I've found so far:





Designed this one with Photoscape:

 

[QuietCompany]

Also a question, how do you edit a thread? I don't see the option on the page.

I'm mainly interested in learning how to make pictures look dated/torn (but not antique) and how to design better and fancier borders/lines/patterns rather than simple ones and how to spice up a design like this:

 

[RTContent]

Do you mean like this? It's pretty easy all you need to do is find a 'texture' of old paper, put it on the top layer and change the Blending mode to Multiply. As for more intricate designs for the boarder I'm not really familiar with trading cards so I wouldn't know where to start..

 

[QuietCompany]

The effect above is a bit drastic. There are two types of cards I'm trying to design, a modern card such as the first one below and a vintage one that looks like it's from the 70s such as the second one below. For that particular card in the post above, it's suited to having a modern look and I don't want to apply any vintage effects to it. What I've found is that if you are gonna make a vintage card then you must apply a transformation to the border/card AND to the player himself such as in the 1st card in the OP where the player looks like he's been illustrated. If you apply a vintage effect to a card without changing the player's appearance then it looks a bit weird.

One effect I'd like to know for the vintage one is how to apply a brush (I think it's actually called pallete knife) so that it looks like part of the card is ripped or damaged).

Modern types:


Vintage types: