I’ve finished all of the art for my steampunk-gearpunk playing card deck. That was the easy part. The court cards took the most time, even though they are relatively simple compared to something you might see in this sort of deck (which is really cool, by the way). The Jules Verne card is my favorite, but this Thomas Edison card will always be a bit special, in that he and I have the same initials.
Thomas Edison
Anyway, you might note that he’s rusty red now, instead of the silver I’ve been showing thus far for the nonblack cards. Y’see, part of making this into a Kickstarter project is doing market research. It seems like most of the decks offered thus far on Kickstarter and the commentary threads I’ve read suggest that there is a strong desire for traditional playing card design. The standard red/black color scheme is less relevant when talking about custom art on playing cards, but there’s still a strong traditionalist streak to appeal to, it seems. Since I’m not doing the “one eyed Royals” or some of the other fine details of tradition, I figured I’d fall back to the red/black color scheme. I miss the silver/steel Hearts and Diamonds, but rusty red works in the theme, too. I took the opportunity to de-purple the edge too, make it a bit rustier, and spiffy up a few other little things.
10 of Hearts
Similarly, I’ve made a new set of cards that use the standard pip layout instead of the custom one that I did earlier. So… now I effectively have two decks of cards designed. I’ll offer my original silver/black deck via The Game Crafter, and set this new one up as the Kickstarter deck. It’s a bit of a compromise, but it seems like it might be the better choice for the venue. (And, really, though I miss the silver, this new design is looking a bit sharper and more unified anyway. Maybe I’ll do a silver variant sometime, just on principle.)
So yes, the art is done. Doing a Kickstarter campaign requires a bit more than that, so I’m going to a semi-ghost town this weekend, among other things. More on that later.
There’s more research to do, numbers to run, paperwork to file, people to email… plenty of stuff to do before this baby is ready to launch. But it’s getting there, and I’m pretty excited to get it out there for public consumption. Thanks for your interest, everyone!
These are really great Taylor – can’t wait to buy a set! Is it possible to do both color schemes on Kickstarter? Say if you put in a large enough donation you get x sets of the standard cards plus a bonus set of the silver color scheme?
I thought about that, yes. I may do that as a stretch goal. I’m still digging into numbers, but I think it would be possible. Not sure if we’d hit critical mass on the Kickstarter, but it’s worth a shot, right?
Totally worth a try – i think your artwork is fantastic. Really clean, really well presented – you’ll do great with this, i’m totally buying a bunch of them for gifts etc…
If you want to promote it on http://www.arc9.com feel free – you can upload up to 1GB of images/videos for free. The feature i’m thinking that might be helpful within the arc9/community site is the ability to simultaneously post any images/video to facebook, twitter, linkedin, youtube. Might be handy for managing that aspect of the marketing you’ll have to do soon.
Hrm… yes, I’ll look into that tonight. It’s definitely a good thing to get the word out. Thanks, Tom!
I’m not a card player of any kind, but I think these look absolutely awesome and I would totally get a deck! great work :)
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[…] love to add them to my dice collection, what I’m really drooling over are his designs for his Steampunk-themed playing cards, what he’s calling his Tinker Deck. Hopefully he will Kickstart the Tinker Deck someday soon, incorporating the lessons learned from […]