Thank you for your kind feedback - I'm glad you like the art
I might look into creating a poker size version in the future ...

Thanks again for stopping by to look

*wave*

Hello

Great so see your designs here  and nice to see the extension of your Tarocchi di Marcelo Inciso deck - Master Graven, cool name
To me, the King of Spades without the border line works the best... as the eye is drawn to the figure. I like the artwork, so my comments are just ideas on making the art 'pop'
Maybe tone down the 'rusticness' in the background to add more contrast between figure and background...? The design reminds me of old copper graphic prints (etchings) - you could see it as a balance between cleaning up the 'plate' and having enough ink in the etched lines to achieve the desired effect

I also like the earlier suggestions to make the background 2-way and move the indices a bit closer to the edge, as it would add to the 'playability' of the deck

The King in your Planaren Karten deck looks as though he is sitting on a chair (sideways effect) - looking forward to seeing the other courts and where you end up taking this deck

Thanks for sharing - and *wave*

Quote from: BlueToy on June 20, 2015, 01:18:04 PM

Quote from: Don Boyer on June 20, 2015, 12:15:05 PM

BlueToy!

Hopefully you're aware of our 2nd Annual PCF Deck Design Competition?  It just started Wednesday!

Grand prize is that EPCC (the sponsor) produces your deck and you receive three gross (36 dozen) decks of it.

Last year's winner, the Evil Deck by Giovanni Meroni, is on sale NOW at the Conjuring Arts Research Center store.

http://www.playingcardforum.com/index.php?topic=8328.0

Thanks Don! Will look into it more and consider the possibilities. Or maybe I'll try to create a new deck jusg for the competition.

Any criticisms and suggestions on the samples I posted, as well as my current predicament?

Predicament?  What predicament?  Until the formal entries begin, you can offer up as many designs as you desire and are physically capable of posting!  Let the membership decide which one they seem to like the most, then make that your official entry.  Old designs, new designs - as long as they're your designs and haven't been previously produced.

My take on your designs...

Golden Court would make a lovely art deck, though the design as it exists now is terribly impractical.  In fact, it would almost work better as a series of art prints than it would as a pack of cards (though that's not necessarily a bad thing).  There are tweaks that could be made to make them more practical, but I think it might actually take away from the artistic value.  There's nothing wrong with an impractical deck if that is the audience you're aiming for - but you should know up front that the audience for artistic but impractical decks isn't as large as the audience for nice, practical ones!

You could actually make those to be completely "old school" by removing the indices and making a one-way court design.  It was popular among wealthy households, before playing cards were printed, to have handmade cards in the home.  Some homes had special sets that were made not on paper but on decorative card-sized slates of silver or gold, with the design engraved into the metal.  They were never played with, just displayed, but they were attractive and functioned as the medieval version of conspicuous consumption!  If you had enough money to have such a deck made and displayed in your home, you had a LOT of money!  You could modify this deck to give the appearance of one of those "conspicuous consumption" decks, but have it printed on paper.  There are companies that will print foil directly onto the card itself - the price is significantly higher, but they would be a lovely way to complement the design you've started with.

Sa Baranggay will be a popular deck, should you get around to making it - Filipinos love their cards, it seems.  The design with the Queen is most appealing - the background color is more muted and the look is more modern because of the "frameless" appearance.  The frameless courts look is very popular, and for good reason - it really shows off the art to remove the boundaries like that.

With Master Graven, you have a tough row to hoe.  Again, this might be a case where artistic merits are trumping practicality and you need to consider which way to go - make it more of an art project or more of a practical deck.  If you go artistic, stop worrying about being monochrome - there are plenty of monochrome decks out there, yours won't be alone.  If you go practical, yes, you will need something to distinguish the color - and more importantly, you'll need to clean the edges.  If you let your cards print into the bleed in these big broad patterns that look like grave rubbings, you'll in essence be creating a marked deck.  The edge differences from card to card will be visible, and with practice, one could use them to distinguish cards from each other.  The only way to prevent it would be to make them ALL identical in their pattern, at least at the edge where the card's die line is.  Even there, you'd still run the risk of off-center face prints screwing it up for you - not all printers are precise enough when it comes to alignment of backs and faces, and for those that aren't precise enough, they'll focus on making the back centered, to the detriment of the face's centering - the backs are more important to look uniform in appearance.

This could be another design that might look better really old-school - no indices, just a big suit pip and a one-way court image.  You can even square the corners - rounded corners, indices and two-way courts weren't common until sometime well into the latter half of the 19th Century CE, in the antebellum years following the American Civil War.  Even the joker wasn't invented until around that time - originally it was a trump card for the card game euchre - the name "joker" is a bastardized pronunciation of euchre, which I believe has Germanic origins.

Planaren Karten!  This deck would likely have the strongest appeal to a modern audience of all the designs you've displayed.  There's the old-fashioned feel to it in how the Kings look, all simple and blocky like some kind of folk art, but the art style also looks like something right out of an eight-bit video game.  This would be the most commercially viable of them all so far.  You get to combine nostalgia for old card design and nostalgia for old video games of the 1980s and 1990s into a single deck!  What hipster (and too-old-to-be-a-hipster-no-matter-how-hard-they-try) wouldn't want a pack of them?

Oh, I remember you. Nice golden cards. Not very practical, but nice.
http://playingcardcollector.net/2013/02/03/playing-card-art-by-blue-fusion/

By the way, you can find yourself somewhere here
http://www.playingcardforum.com/index.php?topic=4095.0

Very good illustrations. Golden Court looks beautiful but the index is somewhat hard to see and is too far from the corner for easy playing. The black border may cause some trouble due to bleeding at the edge. It could still sell if you marketed it purely for its appearance alone.

Is Master Graven based on the Tarot de Marseille? I think the red suits should be white but have a thick outline.