Playing cards ALL

I went back to my card designs and I was thinking of screen printing some of my designs and decided to do my designs for Janmashtami, Krishna’s birthday and on that day, Gujarati women stop all house work and play card games.

I decided to design king as Krishna, queen as Radha, Jack as Goamatha and joker as Kaliya the evil snake.

The screen prints were based on the King card however I designed digital prints of the cards and 4 aces! Obviously if I had more time I would have developed a whole pack of cards.

I scanned in my prints I made using stencils of geometric shapes and henna hand stencils. I used these as the background. The card designs were drawn in my sketchbook then cleaned up and adjusted on Photoshop. Also the designs show the merging of traditional skills and computer tools, likewise my design does the same, taking a traditional festival and bringing it up to date.

example of number card/ back design

 I went for these colours because of the colour palette I looked at concerning my screen prints and the colours I saw of contemporary prints in a book. Not forgetting designers such as Hiroshi Tanabe and Pablo Alfieri who inspired me.

The outcome was very successful, extremely pleased with the cards. The feedback from my fellow peers and family was very positive. They thought the designs were very strong, kept the typical format of the card however choice of colour and design of the figures and type gave that edge to the work.

 If I had more time, I would have edited the Radha design, find it a little bulky. Also would have been interestign to try different colours etc but time was limited. Furthermore I would have loved to develop a  whole pack; a potential future project.