VIZAĜO – A Creative Roadmap
The journey from first idea to a finished deck of playing cards takes many winding turns and side-tracks.
This page illustrates stages involved in creating VIZAĜO Playing Cards, from sketches to launch, including tools and materials, along with statistics (not that I’m a numbers person, though I thought it was fun to keep track of a few oddities along the way) and… a little background about the journey before creating this deck and what inspires me.
Creating a deck of cards
VIZAĜO has a connection with the teapots mugs and bows I used to make from clay. Through a long process of drawing, developing and refining the artwork, the whimsical faces made the transition from clay to a deck of cards. The artwork style is influenced by traditional line-drawing & wood-cut techniques with bold lines and segmented planes of colour.
From idea to finished design
This deck is a labour of love involving countless hours. Pencils, ink pens, & plenty of paper, along with my trusted drawing tablet have all been part of bringing the characters to life.
Connected through colour
I chose a different colour palette for each suit in VIZAĜO to emphasise the symbolic difference between the suits: Hearts – love and emotion, Clubs – inspiration and fire, Diamonds – prosperity and earth, Spades – wisdom and air.
Colours shared and accentuated between the different suits allows your eye to move across the cards and visually connect the deck as a whole.
While both colour versions – Lumina ( red) and Lumino (blue) – have identical faces, a creative play on light and dark allows the card back and box design for each version to shine.
