Playing Cards
Dia De Los Muertos, is the name of a brand for playing cards based on the theme of The Mexican Day Of The Dead. Thus, the name. Dia De Los Muertos which means Mexican day of the dead in Mexican language.
But what is Mexican day of the dead? The Day of the Dead, is a Mexican holiday where families welcome back souls of their deceased relatives for a brief reunion and the celebration includes food, drink and celebration. On this day, people wear vibrant skull masks and extremely colourful gothic costumes and jewelleries. It is celebrated on 2nd of November.
So here, we were given a brief to take the regular pack of solitaire playing cards and change their designs drastically, keeping in mind, an art movement of our choice. The challenge here was that the players should still be able to adapt to these designs as easily as they did in the original version of solitaire cards.
I always admired my fellow classmates gothic style of illustration and somehow desired to merge the gothic style and my style of illustration, both together. Plus, I had watched the movie COCO (just before I started ideating on this project) which is based on the same theme and was shook by watching their animation style. I was so inspired that I thought Dia de los muertos would be a perfect topic to make my playing cards on. Not only were the results so satisfactory, but even the process was so pleasurable. Come let me guide you through the project.
When I spoke to my professor about the idea, he was a little concerned as to how it may turn out. If it was even possible to make the illustrations, such that they would actually pop out from the solid black background and catch any layman's eye. If skulls and flowers suit the whole idea of solitaire. So, I imagined how luminous paints would look in a dark room. This made it so easy for me to select my colour pallette.
A little about illustration: I wanted the skull to be the centre of attention, hence placed it on the packaging bang in the centre, with highly saturated colours and piercing eyes. I wanted the skull not look so secluded and dark, that's why illustrated bunch of wild leaves and flowers around the skull so it feel like the skull is coming out of a dense wild forest. This added a level of mystery in the feel of the cards. At the same time, care was taken to emphasise on the celebration rather than the horrors associated with skulls and black colour.
I made the skulls eyes the way they are so that the opponent player feels that your cards are looking right into their eyes and the game gets intimidating.
Finally! New kings and queens in the rule! Just kidding. They're still the same. They just upgraded their costumes and added some makeup and lost some weight. Basically, I illustrated them after they had their glo up ;) I illustrated them in their back profile to give the opponent player a message that even when I'm revealing my cards, I'm not revealing my entire game strategy. Again, this would make the opponent intimidated and that makes the game so challenging.