Kerri-Jane Mitchell, an artist from Cape Town (South Africa), designed the Queen of Hearts as some symbiosis of two epochs in the life of this lady. Different ages, different moods – different dresses, different friends 🙂
© Kerri-Jane Mitchell 2011
The Queen of Hearts by Kerri-Jane Mitchell
Hector Perez is an American artist. He decided to design his own concept of hand illustrated playing card deck devoted to early Mesoamerican civilization (the complex of indigenous cultures that developed in parts of Mexico and Central America prior to Spanish exploration and conquest in the 16th century). Courts and Jokers are inspired by appropriate ancient gods and goddesses. These playing cards have a little bit unusual faces (even for one way cards), but they keep the classic Anglo-French playing card hierarchy. Each god and goddess is identified by colour, and by ear jewelry that relates to each of the suits. The number cards are identified by the number of rings as well as the suits.
Unfortunately, the colourful lines with the names of cards make this deck as unusual as unpractical. Playing card collectors… and especially playing card players know that any colourful part (including black) of playing card faces having white or light background marks each card when it touches any edge of the card and isn’t equally repeated in all cards. But some fading effect can make these cards more practical and save their originality quite nicely. Also it is strange that number cards don’t have their names in contrast to the courts and aces.
© Hector Perez 2014
Mesoamerican Playing Cards by Hector Perez
Pedro Felipe Giraldo Mejia is a Colombian artist. He decided to create playing card artworks devoted to different incarnations of dragons. These cards look like artworks affected by different cultures because they have different stylistics. Dragons are symbolic not only in Eastern mythology. Quite often mythographers mark out two main cultural traditions of dragons: the European dragon, and the Eastern dragon. The first one comes from European folk traditions based on Greek and Middle Eastern mythologies. The second one is a composite creature combining different dragons from East Asia countries (Chinese dragon, Japanese dragon, and other dragons from appropriate countries which have their own peculiarities). So, the artworks look like a collection of both “draconian” cultural traditions.
© Pedro Felipe Giraldo Mejia 2014
Dragon Playing Card by Pedro Felipe Giraldo Mejia: Kings
These playing card artworks were created by an American artist, Liz Rust. She decided that her playing card faces should depict peasants instead of royalty. Proceeding from faces of the characters, Liz believes that only animals have happy life in farm yards. Uneasy working days of peasants.
© Liz Rust 2015
Peasant Playing Cards by Liz Rust
Monica Lee, an American artist, designed this set of Spades playing card artworks as her class work in 2013. The project worked with watercolor and gouache on panel. She decided to turn shape of playing card suit into the imaginary vegetation of garden, where the Jack should be a gardener, the Queen should be a madam, and the King should be a child living in the house of the garden.
The final design is a set of pleasant semi-transformation playing cards.
© Monica Lee 2013
Semi-Transformation playing cards by Monica Lee: The Five of Spades
PLAYING CARDS + ART = COLLECTING 