About a decade ago I had the privilege of painting a card deck of fantasy medieval fighters, thieves, assassins, and sorcerers for Will Hindmarch. He had pitched the card deck as both a play aid (the game he was developing at the time used a traditional poker deck) and a world building tool, filling the game with NPCs who taught the players about potential character encounters, NPC alliances, and the flavour and feel of the world they were playing in.
Thanks to these robust goals, I spent a fair amount of the time on these doing character design work and just so, so much research. We built these characters, their outfits, accessories, and any environment you caught glimpses of, out of a variety of medieval, Renaissance, and more recent cultural notes, with a focus on making sure our cast spanned Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Before I set pen to tablet, I did a lot of drawing on paper, trying to nail down these characters as individuals, and to hammer out what poses best sold the character in the context of the playing card conceit, as we had the goal of keeping the surreal doubling of a bicycle-style poker deck’s face cards.
When I was working on these, Will gave me permission to stream the painting process, and I spent hours and hours on Twitch painting in Photoshop and chatting with other art nerds on stream. I made some important art friends that way! And I learned that streaming is a whole job in and of itself, and probably not the way I want to build my career on the internet overall. It was fun! But I’m not really built for it.
I also hand-lettered the cards, providing Will with all the numbers, letters, and icons required to build out the full deck. We built the lettering style by combining typographic influences from a variety of medieval manuscripts, and I painted them on paper to get as much texture as possible for the overlays on the backs of the cards, and then turned them into simpler vectors for use in the graphic design:
In the end, we built a deck with 16 painted face cards and two painted Jokers (functionally the detectives that pursue the various criminal elements you meet elsewhere in the deck), and I remain very proud of them all!
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