This is the third time I've had the privilege to design a playing card deck for Jonathon Lamarque of Meadowlark Decks. For this series, he asked what I'd be interested in doing, and ... this was the result. The inspiration is vintage space toys and comics, and the idea was to build the deck around an imaginary comic book or TV series. I wanted to capture the whimsy and slightly naive depiction of early space-themed adventures. The drawings are intentionally imperfect, yet somewhat more life-like than I generally tend to illustrate. Studying mid-century space-themed toy and product packaging, the illustrations — though beautiful and evocative — were often done imprecisely, which for me, adds to their hand-made charm. I wanted to capture some of that in this series.

Initially, I designed the cards as mirrored, and in a much more slick, vintage-futuristic style. However, the more I worked with the cards, the more I realized my environments and characters were limited by the size. And as I continued to research vintage space toys and products, an idea arose to treat these more as trading cards, rather than traditional playing cards. In the end, each card was treated essentially as individual posters.

I created vector shells, and hand-"painted" the cards using a Wacom Cintiq, in Photoshop.

As we got further into this, we got more excited and had more and more ideas (too many). One of them was to create a comic-book-cover-like poster that could double as a postcard to promote the project. The full-size poster is being sold as part of the campaign. (Note: only the first colorway is available for purchase). Note: there are also hidden gems in the poster, cards, and packaging; for example the invisible girl and a "space cat" on one of the jokers both were request of Jonathon, and have significance. 

The tuckbox packaging mimics an old mid-century space comic book cover, hinting at the excitement contained within. The interior decks are identical (budget simply wouldn't allow for 12 more characters!) but the the tucks for Series 01 and Series 02 are unique. In addition, holo-foil versions are offered for each as well. (See photos at end of this scroll).

Ok, how could this be complete without a lunchbox. Originally, I had designed a small tin (shown above), like we had done for a previous project, but a lunchbox, though requiring more production budget, just had to happen.

All photography included below is courtesy of Chris Moyer. Please check out his work. Great guy, and talented photographer.