Progress for Week 1

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 cards that are produced by Bicycle. By this I mean that I want to have the mirrored image, where one half is mirrored onto the bottom half.

To help with creating my thumbnails, I created some templates of the cards. It has a dark outline tag represents the edge of the card and a lighter rectangle inside of that which represents the portion of the card that contains the images and value of the card. Here is what the templates look like.

I have another version of the template that has only six cards and they are half the size of the largest cards show above. I have completed several sketches using these templates. Here they are.

Once I have more sketches I will upload more images. I am not researching ideas for patterns and design elements I want to include in the final image for each card. I was originally thinking of creating a final version of the face cards for one suit a week, but I don't know if I can do that with my current workload outside of class. Instead, I am going to try and get all of the sketches done for every face card in the deck by Monday of next week so that I can then try to get the cards done as quickly as possible when I have more time to invest in working on the computer.