ILLUSTRATION INSANITY CHALLENGE!!(◡‿◡✿)
This project is to create an own-designed card deck using illustration tools such as Adobe Illustrator. I was expected to be one of the biggest projects in this Digital Illustration course, and in fact it took over one month from brainstorming to print submission.
I went through some sketches. I had some several ideas to build minimalism design, but this time I just wanted to try some different things that I’ve never done before. I chose a style that has more intricate illustrations. After that, I decided to go deeper and assigned different emotions, clothes, job roles and themes to each suit; suit of hearts is associated with elegance/light sorcerer, diamonds with divinity/guardian, spades with mystery/assassin (ninja), and clubs with terror/dark sorcerer. I also did the same thing to the color palette.
Then, I went back to detailed sketches. Since many characters are in motion, I had to figure out the structure of human body and different styles of clothing, and the additional research on Pinterest was quite time-consuming. Adobe Illustrator was the main tool to use in this project. I selected an oval-shaped brush to draw the outlines of character. My drawing was mouse only. I had to hit Ctrl + Z each time I made mistakes, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable way to draw. When one illustration was finished, I went back and sketch next one again. For the design of cards, I selected black stroke as a frame because I thought it was cohesive to the illustrations. I selected this specific typeface because the “Q” letter was unique when I first looked at it, and I wanted to apply to my card design. I make sure the color that I fill into the images, and the card itself fits with the color palette that I set up in the previous process.
Finally..., this is what I got:
In my personal experience, this is the most learning, and challenging task that I have done so far, especially the illustration method was new and fresh to me. Additionally, I had to create total 12 images for the JQK cards. I cannot say it was a comfortable work, but such studying experience was worth to go through, and I became happy and proud when finished all of them. Also, I learned how to choose small elements such as typeface and color to make designs consistent. This is probably the most successful artwork, and it should go to one of my portfolios. Peace.
