Monday, November 7, 2011

Cards: Spades

Halloo all!

As part of my mail-project to N, I decided to start designing a deck of cards. I've always wanted to make a set, and it's a nice finite sort of project. For my deck, I decided that I wanted to play with the royal cards, and give each suit a different animal. I had been doing quite a few sketches and doodles of birds for an earlier project and arbitrarily assigned them to the spades.

The first thing I did was design the Ace. I needed to get a feel for the overall shape of the suit elements. Was the spade itself rounded, pointy, wide, skinny, elongated...?


After the ace, I did a bunch of the numbers just to play with layout.



And finally, it was time for the fun part, the royal cards -

The Jack, who I imagined to be a self-important, plump little bird.


The Queen, a regal but distant sort of lady bird.


The King, somewhat aloof and irritated, most often by his Jack.


Once I had all of the cards in the suit done, I had a basic sense of the color palette and the overall shapes and feel of the characters, and I was ready to design the back of my deck.


Stay tuned, dear readers. Next week, diamonds!

2 comments:

  1. They look even more AMAZING in person. I can't decide whether to play with them or build them a shrine.

    ReplyDelete

Thoughts, profundities, absurdities, random-tangents, non-sequiturs: