Wow, these look really good! I LOVE your double spread of the truck, so great.

The feedback I've seen for other artists here has been remarkably constructive, so I'm hoping you'll have some helpful thoughts for my project as well. This is my first deck of cards and my desire is for the deck to be good for play, magic and flourishes.

I've finished my first round of Queens and want to get the elements right here before moving on to the other courts.

Fingers crossed these files render okay here!

Do the four pieces feel balanced as a set to you? Are there two for instance that feel too similar, or is there one that is too left field of the others?  Any thoughts on the colour scheme? For you folks with Asian heritage - have I done justice to the faces? Are there any I should take another shot at? I've taken a lot of artistic license with the hair and clothes, as I don't want to be restricted by historical accuracy, but are there any elements that strike you as ridiculous?

If you do magic or flourishes, are there any graphical touches I should add (or remove!) that would make the artwork support how you ultimately use the deck?

Thank you for your thoughts! The Kings are already sketched, but I'd like to feel settled with the Queens before filling in the King bodies.

Hello people! I am very pleased to have found this forum. I'm Melissa, and a graphic designer under the name Emdash. It's a typography joke, not a very good one.

I'm starting work on a personal project of my first deck of cards with the working title Ten Kingdoms. It is inspired by Chinese Imperial portraits. My initial idea came from my OBSESSION with martial arts films, but I quickly figured out I could run into copyright issues and that's no fun, so extended it to my more general love of Chinese cinema.

My current work is on my instagram feed here, if you want to take a look (maybe follow me and boost my self esteem?): https://www.instagram.com/emdash_hill/

I am also a crap cardist. I practice every day and I'm still pretty crap but it's a good time and every time I have a breakthrough I do a victory jog around my studio shouting "In your FACE! Boom! You got NOTHIN'!" at the deck. I keep at it because I have a vision of myself as an old lady in the old folks home amusing myself and the other residents with rad flourishes. I figure sleight of hand is not going to work in this scenario so I'm leaving the magic mostly out of it, but practice my back palm every morning anyway because it looks impressive when proper magicians do it and who knows? Maybe one day the dexterity will come.

I've always like cards and have a small collection of vintage and artist-designed cards. I got first committed to card design as an idea when I collaborated with London artist Pony Tee to design a pingpong bat for the charity project The Art of Ping Pong a couple years ago. We did a two-sided design with hand gilding, with a King Grohl (oh, yeah!) and Queen Gaga. I'm pretty chuffed with that project actually. It's owned by a London-based designer and you can probably convince her to part with it, but you might have to kneecap her.

So, that's me I guess. I'm looking forward to getting to know folks here and learning more about making an awesome deck. I'm planning to fund it through kickstarter hopefully in about 6 weeks, but I want to make sure it's good for play, magic and cardistry so I've got lots of questions I'm hopeful you all can give me good guidance. Quite excited actually!