Nowadays all of a sudden there seems to be a whole world of newly designed playing cards out there, the scene has changed hugely since I began doing it only a short decade ago (before things like social media, crowd funding, and custom deck programs at card manufacturers changed everything forever). As usual I can only describe the whys and wherefores of my own experiences though (figure 1) so away we go......
Design Foundation
You can’t draw anything without having some kind of a reference.
That can just as easily be an ‘idea in progress’ in your head as an actual reference image printed on photo paper, or a mixture of both. But no matter what the source of inspiration, the fact I would be using lines, shapes, colours and symbols in
