For this project, I was tasked with designing and illustrating a full deck of cards, including the face designs, the back design, and the box. Overall, I designed 52 cards—the size of a standard playing deck.
For my cards, I decided on basing the theme around Halloween. I knew that I wanted to draw human faces, but I did not want to follow the standard medieval theme that many cards had. I wanted a variety of Halloween monsters, so I decided on vampires for hearts; werewolves for diamonds; dullahans for clubs; and witches for spades. At first, I wanted the symbol of each suit to be traditional, but then decided that it would be more fitting and cohesive if I changed the symbols to match the theme of each monster/suit.
Because of the size of this project, I decided to use Clip Studio Paint as it is the program I am most comfortable with. I began this project by sketching on paper, and then transferred those sketches onto my computer. From there, I designed the corners of each card—meaning the spiderwebs and numbers/letters—and then I designed each suit. After this, I began to line, color, and shade each card individually.
During the first work in progress, I was given a few pieces of advice. First, the numbers and letters were getting too lost in the spiderwebs in the corners. Secondly, the color I chose to represent the clubs did not mesh well with my pumpkin characters. I was also advised to add more colors to the back of my card. Additionally, a couple of my peers had difficulty understanding my club illustration, so I took it upon myself to simplify it in the future.
During the second work in progress, I was advised again to add more colors into the back of my card. Additionally, they felt that the gray title on my box was too close to the background and needed to be changed. By the end, I decided to simplify my box down to two colors—red and gray—because I felt that it would have been too overwhelming had I chosen to include all four colors seen in my suits. I also chose to add the illustration from one of my cards onto the back to distinguish it more from the front of the box.
This project was definitely a lesson in time management. It was extremely easy to fall behind because of how many cards needed to be illustrated. Although I chose Clip Studio Paint as my program because it is one I’m more comfortable with, I believe that using Adobe Illustrator may have benefited me more because of the amount of copying, pasting, flipping, and general adjusting. Because I was using a raster program and needed to constantly resize and reposition elements, I had to learn how to preserve my quality so that my images wouldn’t become pixelated.
