Sea Of Pain Fine Art Productions- Brett A. Jones

A few years ago I was asked if I thought I could improve on standard playing cards. It wasn't lost on me as I hunted around the studio for some to look at that even though I had never been a card player, I was sure I'd find some. I did. I saw three things straight away. Playing cards must be a huge market, there was vast untapped room for improvement with the design from what I could see, and it would be a monumental undertaking to do anything about it.

I started to study the traditional designs and realized there was features and symbols common to all English court cards that went back hundreds of years but in some cases had been edited, chopped, changed and re-interpreted to the point of absolute abstraction. Every question my research answered also created more questions and before I knew it I had flown into a perfect storm of obsession, inspiration, frustration and fascination. So many aspects of this project suited the strange way my brain is wired, and so many times during the course of the campaign, I consciously felt myself standing in the same footprints of unknown numbers of artists before me, faced with all the same design problems they must have faced trying to improve on the old geometric woodcut layouts. I wanted to use real models with facial features and bone structures suited to the personality of each court card. After my no holding back dive into the known origins, symbolism, legends, and general history of the face cards, I picked not only the shape of the face but also the type of demeanour suited best to each character in the deck.

European court cards have always been more lifelike than their English counterparts, but are really just two identical pictures divided by a straight or oblique line with no attempt made to make the dividing point part of the overall design. The faces on European cards are smaller than the English ones as well, to fit more of the body of the character into one half of the card. English cards on the other hand have got relatively larger faces and the design blends from one end to the other using mostly abstract geometric shapes to vaguely suggest the body, but they suffer badly from the anatomical compromises necessary for this to make any sense at all.

It was a huge challenge to get past this design obstacle, but an equally huge opportunity. The solution was to give each end three quarters of the card instead of half and organize the designs to not just hide the halfway mark, but remove it altogether. It was the hardest part of the whole deal, and not lost on me that if I got it right, no-one would even notice. It created a whole new series of problems that I hammered into more opportunities to add to the design. I wanted to make every single card in the deck a work of art that could stand in it's own right, but at the same time be an obvious part of the rest of the designs including the jokers and card back.

Every single card has got a design unique to it with careful choice of colours used to tie the suits (and whole deck) together. The whole colour thing was something I had wanted to play with for a long time, probably made more intense by the preceding few years of working in nothing but monochrome (graphite). Standard playing cards are red and black and always have been. I wanted to fit the entire colour wheel of primary and secondary colours into it without losing the black Spade/Club and red Heart/Diamond thing which has become so familiar over hundreds of years. This was a chance to directly connect the number cards, face cards, jokers, aces, and the cardback with colour for the first time in history (except for an attempt to make the four suits bright red, blue, yellow, and green which was never going to catch on).

At card size they still look black or red but with two intertwined threads of colour inside the suit symbols the spades look black with a blue tint, the clubs black with a green tint, hearts red with a red/purple tint and diamonds red with an orange tint. It's very subtle, a heart just looks red until you lay a diamond next to it for example, the thought that people playing cards with them will identify the suits with colour without even realizing they are doing it appeals to me a lot. It added a whole new dimension to the project.

Apart from the colour wheel thing, I decided to use the shapes of the suit symbols themselves as much as I could for the overriding theme in all the scrollwork on the engraved weapons, helmets and armour, crown construction, clothing and jewellery to give each suit it's own subconsciously identifiable design characteristics in shape as well as colour. I used either the whole symbol., multiple intertwined symbols or different parts of the symbol wherever I could.

The aces bring together all the design threads onto what for me were joyously empty canvasses with endless mind bending possibilities to go sick on. The Ace of Spades has traditionally been the title card of the deck (they financed wars with the taxes collected from playing card sales hundreds of years ago, it was a death sentence to sell a deck of cards without the tax stamp on the Ace of Spades, which had to be the top card of decks for sale) so I made sure it's still the most imposing card in the deck (but I definitely left no room for a tax stamp. They were still doing it in England up to the 1960's).

At the point in playing card evolution that the royal cards lost their legs and became reversible, they also lost a hand and half their weapon in some cases when a thick white border appeared around the edge to display a standardized index in the top left/bottom right corners. The existing designs were not shrunk to suit but cropped. The card tax became so ridiculously high that the actual quality of the cards and the standard of the designs dramatically declined, leading to much loss of details and clarity.

After a lot of research and then a lot more research, I gave them all their hands back and the weaponry they used to have in the misty beginning. I gave the King of Hearts his battleaxe back for example, for many years he has been known as the "Suicide king" because it looked like he'd stuck his own sword in his ear. In reality he lost his axe head when his suit symbol (Heart) migrated from right to left a long time ago and covered it when all the suit symbol positions became standardized. The remainder of the axe handle became a sword hilt in the following years and stayed that way for a long time. It's bound to cause controversy as the traditional name for the other red king, the diamond, is "the man with the axe". Similarly, the King of Clubs has got a grip on his royal orb again, the Queen of Spades is armed again as she should be and the blackjack has finally regained his sword and armour piercing war hammer. They are all doing something symbolic that goes back a long way, so I put it all back in, as well as obviously making them stand in their traditional poses (even this aspect has evolved over the years to some extent). A couple have actually got their back to you, all queens are holding their flower in a particular way and are all using their free hands in the same particular way right back through history, as are the kings and jacks. I could write a book on all the subtleties and details that went into the design but space fills fast and I want to explain my technique, the "Flying by the Seat of the Pants Up a Steep Learning Curve Against the Wind" method.

I drew all the suit symbols first (over 80, all different), big and small, on A4 paper exactly three times bigger than playing card size as all the freehand layouts I drew in the studio were, as a playing card three times bigger is serendipitously just a bit smaller than A4 so easy to scan onto the computer for flogging with the photoshop stick down the track.

By then I had worked out whose faces I wanted to use for the court cards so I went out and collected dozens of photos of their faces and hands up close and further back for a face and hands together shot for scaling decisions later, then went back to the studio and drew freehand A3 linework portraits of them all. I made over two dozen A4 layout boards to work all the freehand A4 originals up at once. I scaled the portraits down onto the A4 face card layouts and drew the scaled down hands where my imagination told me they would fit on both ends at once to make the whole design blend past the halfway mark from either way up. This taught me a lot and I then had to change the scale and position of a lot of the faces and nearly all of the hands (2 or 3 times in some cases) to make the compositions work anatomically.

The next stage was to decide how their bodies, shoulders, arms etc, were to be arranged to maintain their traditional stance but merge seamlessly in the middle. After that came the crown, battle helmet, weapon and flower designs. Then the clothing and armour, hair, jewellery, etc. Next stage was the actual patterns on the clothes and weapons themselves, sticking as much as I could to the suit symbol shape theme.

I was bringing up the back design at the same time, incorporating all the suit symbols with their colour schemes overlapping into each others territory with an even deeper theme of coloured spiral underlaying it all, with an uppermost layer of white celtic banding involving two of each suit symbol intertwined in a perfect celtic knot.

There are 32 suit symbols in three layers in the back design and they are all intertwined. It's the only design where all the colour schemes appear together. It had to be diagonally symmetrical, have every colour in the wheel, bring all the features of the deck into one design, and be a classy cardback. I did it completely freehand in graphite and coloured pencil before scanning it into photoshop for cleaning up into a digital file.

I designed the aces then, involving the suit symbol based celtic knot work like the cardback and underlaying it in coloured pencil with the coloured spiral thing in the colours of each suit. A further layer of suit symbols was hidden in the spiral itself. These too were then scanned onto the computer on my $60 Aldi's scanner into photoshop format and I then used a graphics tablet to go over every single millimetre of the entire design (still completely freehand) on a 42" monitor (A 22" and a 20" side by side) to make it as clear, precise and vibrant as I could, never losing sight of the fact that playing cards are small and the clearer and bolder the designs were, the better the playing cards would look. I wanted to give them an illuminated script/leadlight sort of feel. The jokers are the only asymmetrical face cards. I wanted to really make it a wild card, and make them the opposite to all the other face cards but unmistakeably tied in with the overall deck design. The nothing and everythingness of the joker appeals to me a lot and is partly the reason I used my own mug for it (and partly because I couldn't expect anyone else to make a crook face like the cranky end). A particularly surreal moment came when I realized I'd never drawn my own face before and the first two times I did are both on the same picture and might end up being printed millions of times. There's a black (club/spade) joker and a red (heart/diamond) joker so I gave them a box like the other face cards and coloured background using the spiral thing.

In the olden days, the joker was "Il Matto"(the madman). Every village had one apparently, wandering naked in the mud, having huge mood swings, living with one foot in the half-light of the spirit world, and screaming incoherent imprecations at folk from time to time. The longer this torturously huge job dragged on the more I felt I understood him.

He was missing from the pack for hundreds of years and only emerged in the late 1800's in North America as a "juker", the top trump in Euchre (apparently, I'm no card player) but of course in those days he sat a horse with a cowboy hat on. Court jesters (and any number of other things) came even later. I used the madman as that's the oldest example I could find and it seemed much more appropriate for a wild card. The calm end of the joker is the only one looking back at the viewer in the whole deck, and he's picking a card without looking, even though they are facing him (blind faith), the cranky end doesn't like the choice his other side has made. He has chosen a joker which would be calmly looking back at his own rage, only the other end is looking at another joker, and so on. The spiral background fits well. I've only touched the surface of what's in the deck really.

The cards themselves have been produced to the highest standard in poker size by the United States Playing card Company on 4-ply linen 808 bicycle stock with UV Airflow finish and were published in Sydney in March, 2010. Casinos worldwide will only use cards made by U.S.P.C.C. The first edition (1-10 Redbacks) are already sold out overseas where the deck is in it's third print run (3-10 Bluebacks). The extremely high quality of the cards along with the groundbreaking designs (a lot of the design concepts have never been seen in playing cards before anywhere in the world) certainly makes this a deck for both collectors and card players. First edition (1-10) decks are still available for now in Australia. Blueback (3-10) decks are available here now.

"Destined to be a cult classic"

PokerShop, Australia

"The most beautiful deck of playing cards in the world"

Siberian Museum of Playing Cards, Siberia

"I want a dozen decks put in my coffin when I die"

One Eyed Jack, card illusionist, U.S.A.