Special Project in Illustration: Playing Cards

Unfortunately I ended up getting really busy the past few weeks with a number of other concerns that were pulling me away from working on my cards. I was able to get back to them this past week and wanted to post an update. I have completed all of the number cards and I have a rough placeholder for the aces. The aces may stay that way if I don't end up having time to go back and add more to them. The idea would be to put some cherry blossom patterns in them. I have some rough sketches of the face card designs, I am going to try and get a few of those finalized this week. As far as artist inspiration for the designs, I haven't really chosen a particular artist. Instead, I have looked at some playing cards and have chosen that I want to adopt some of the design elements they use in their cards to the execution of my own original designs. Here are the cards that I have completed so far. The bottom ones that are blank are where I will create the face card designs. I still need ...

I have been fairly busy with writing a master's thesis at the same time as trying to work on my playing cards. This first week was spent trying to find some reference materials so that I could have a better idea of how I wanted to have the cards look. I created several Pinterest boards to gather images together. I knew that cherry blossoms were an iconic image of Japan, so I have a board for that. I have boards for playing cards and samurai as well. You can find them at these URLs: Samurai: https://www.pinterest.com/blackseaninja/samurai/ Cherry Blossoms: https://www.pinterest.com/blackseaninja/cherry-blossoms/ Playing Cards: https://www.pinterest.com/blackseaninja/playing-cards/ I have started work on designing some of the cards already. I have several thumbnails and a few larger versions as I have been working on the overall look of the figure on the card. I have decided that I want to try and have the cards conform as much as possible to conventional poker card...

This blog is meant to be an account of my efforts and time spent in designing a set of playing cards. I plan to design 52 cards, four suites ace through king. I also want to design a box for the cards to be stored in. I will post progress photos as well as some reference images periodically. This project will fulfill the requirements of my Studio Art coursework necessary for obtaining my master's degree. As such, I will be posting a schedule with goals and deadlines in the near future.