Devil in the Details

Beauties, I hope you're all doing well and staying healthy. The weeks are flying by lately, and my life currently feels like it's just work and paying bills. But I didn't want to miss the chance to give you a more detailed update.

For the past month and a half, barely a day has gone by without me working on the court cards for the upcoming Gold Foil Red Roses and BR White Gold Edition. These aren't major design updates or brand new illustrations - the devil's in the details again. All these tweaks are meant to make sure the gold foil on the cards truly shines and comes out perfectly.

Even without having seen the final court cards from my last campaign yet, I already know from another deck that used hot foil stamping that the results won't look bad - but there's still a lot that needs adjusting before my perfectionist brain is satisfied.

So for the past 1.5 months, I've been meticulously adjusting line weights to prevent certain details from getting “eaten up” during printing or bleeding into other design elements. It's hard to explain just how much work has gone into these tiny details - especially when the changes aren't immediately visible at first glance. That's also why I found it difficult to document this progress on Patreon, because I didn't even know where to start.

But I'm going to try and explain it now using the King of Spades as an example. Below you see 2 cards that I have scanned. 10 Year Anniversary KS on top, and BR V1 2022 Edition below:

The scanned gold cold foil looks terrible in this scan, but that's not the point. Before I show you the changes I wanted to show you that WJPC is not so precise when it comes to printing lines. You can see this especially in the eyes. Unfortunately, the white in the eyes is almost completely gone. That's why I redrew the eyes for every court card and changed all the other details that don't really come into their own due to the different line thickness.

I wasn't sure how to put all the changes I've made into words. But then I realized, when I placed both Kings next to each other, that the changes are already visible without having to explain much.

As tiny as these changes may seem, I'm going to go out on a limb and say you won't find another deck with standard court cards that shows this much attention to detail. Countless hours of work - and still my decks are more affordable than many using completely standard USPCC faces.

Thanks for reading and thanks for your support!

Much love

Daniel