Revamping Playing Cards as Personal Oracles

room

Thanks Debra, I hadn't intended to do so many pieces (22 per card!) but I got to cutting triangles. . .

But it gives you an idea of what I'm aiming for.
 

Debra

room said:
I got to cutting triangles. . .

But it gives you an idea of what I'm aiming for.

The Pythagorean Theorem? LOL

I love these two cards. They have a style of their own.....
 

Cerulean

I saw a fun game and thought about this thread

1. One idea...

http://www.fiascogames.com/Secret_history.htm

http://www.fiascogames.com/

2.
I came across a beautiful 'travel' journal for $4.00 at the Barnes and Noble sale section...and thought it would be a cool logbook for a map-astrology kind of game--say take Hodges' Astronomical cards with the constellations and a legend such as the celestial ship Argos dreamily sailing among the heavens with the spirits of those looking for the Golden Fleece of Aries...and catch Pegasus along the way...that kind of thing.

3.
But I digress...I'm actually fiddling around with a gorgeous Japanese collection of blue inky hues on a flower plate and thinking of an impossible sea that mirrors the celestial heavens...and the magical creatures of an imagined island...

Paper and pigment, star and sea
Sleepy summer child raise your eyes
All come from the imaginary
What worlds can you devise?

4.
Or perhaps I will run back to Mitsuwa and pick up the green or plum-red hues and each chapter will be color-coordinated to an element...perhaps like the Hero movie segments...

5.
Or perhaps none of the above, but I will find a way to add Benten to my own Unsun Karuta, as the Seven Gods of Good Fortune float under the Tanabata Bridge, on the River of the Milky Way...halfway home toward the dreams of those who also make wishes on New Year's Day...

Thanks for the fun thread...

Embroidering summer nights
with fancies free...

Cerulean
 

room

Cerulean said:
Embroidering summer nights
with fancies free...

It's hard to decide. You have to pick the right idea so you can get through all 54 cards--requires a bit of commitment, so it has to be something you'll stick to. My first two ideas are like that, but I can't think of another that grabs me.

I love Japanese paper. I have 3 CDs of Japanese textiles and woodcuts on CD--I use them frequently but don't really have a source for real paper. There is a place in Toronto that specializes in it and a local artist used to give me some scraps of her stuff from that store, but my art store doesn't carry patterned paper and I find origami paper too shiny.

Masa paper is supposed to be good to crinkle up and then paint over (similar to doing that with tissue paper only sturdier I expect.) Of course, I can't get hold of masa paper. You could do some nice watercolour art on that over playing cards, and then spark it up with prints of Japanese paper, speaking of devising worlds. . .

Yummy Mari, great ideas as always.
 

room

Gesso Anyone?

This is my next idea for a revamped playing card deck--not just the courts, but all cards. I saw a mixed media artist online several months ago do something like this on a large scale, in a large painting of a woman from a magazine that was painted over, and the book I bought on Artist Trading Cards shows a similar technique.

You are supposed to use a magazine photo. I had a nice collection of fashion magazines but one of my cats threw up on them and I had to discard them. Wrenched my heart, they were great for photo references for sketching.

Anyway, when I went to do this I grabbed a couple of nice fashion photos from the Internet in desperation for something to work with. I glued mine on blue cardstock because I liked the blueish tinge I got with this lovely red-haired woman.

The technique says to lightly brush on gesso with a dry brush to tone down the background and whatever other areas you are going to enhance, but not cover up the photo completely. So I did that--the examples thus far--one printed in photo quality and one printed in economy mode on an inkjet, with applied gesso. I didn't overthink, just laid a few brush strokes down.

Now I just have to decide what to do with them. You can do a straight painterly technique or outline with felt pen and paint inside or anything else you fancy. I'm not quite sure what to do. One of my reasons for doing these playing cards is to loosen up--I get very uptight when faced with a subject like this.
[p.s. are these eyebrows scary or what?]
 

Little Baron

Thanks room.

I understand better now from your examples.

And I think it looks like it will be a very freeing and fun exercise. I will definitely try now that I have some time on my hands. Like you, I need to loosen up as well, when it comes to artworks. I can get very tight and perfectionist about stuff and it often takes the fun out of it.

Look forward to seeing what else happens in this project.

LB
 

room

Well, you didn't have to wait too long. This is so tempting.

I did this with a Faber archival felt pen in sepia and watercolour pencils. Not really the thing, but I like mixing colours this way.

Along the way, she seemed to develop a personality. I felt she was a wee bit self-centred and possibly Parisian. I inadvertently squared off her chin but it's part of her now.

Interesting. If you left more background and had a smaller figure or a full figure against a bigger background, you could also draw some trees or a building or garden or something. Lots of ways to do this.
 

Cerulean

Love the Room sketches!

Love seeing the airy experiments--perfect summer fun.

My own karuta designs...and as I design them, I'm also reminded of some of my collected Japanese tarot cards that had some of these traditional motifs wound into their pretty designs.

Here's my experiments, as I looked from mingei and beautiful charms from 18th and 19th century Japanese designs.

Thanks for this beautiful thread to share inspirations
 

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room

Oh Mari I love those. Very swirly and airy indeed. Lovely colours too.

Yes, I love being inspired too. It's sometimes the little ideas that can spark you into sustained creativity.
 

AJ

Room, is your avatar one of your own pieces of art? I really like it, just never got around to saying it.