King of Diamonds

It took me several years to learn how I need to draw new faces on standard court cards. Today I know my first drawings were crap. But you learn over time, it's a natural process. One of the biggest names in our playing card "bubble" told me that my decks would look a lot better or that I would sell a lot more with standard faces. As you can imagine I wasn't really happy about his unsolicited opinion but from today's perspective I can understand him and I would probably say the same if someone would show me a deck with weird looking faces on the courts.

If you look at my decks you can see the learning curve over the years. I think this is a beautiful detail that shows how much I love - and care about - what I do. It took me over a half decade to reach a point where I can say I'm so happy with my court cards that I can only change small nuances in every new release.

It's hard for me to say goodbye to something when I've invested so much time creating it. For example the Queen of Hearts with the long blonde hair in my first decks. I thought the way I drew her hair was a stroke of genius. I also still think it looks great but to come as  close as possible to the original court card design I had to change it. That took a lot of effort, but of course I couldn't be happier right now about the new version today.

With the goal to come as close as possible to the standard court card drawings, I've changed every court card. Only the King of Diamonds has remained pretty much the same.
The version with the crown is from an MPC deck from 2014. I've only printed 102 decks. I think I removed the crown already in my second release in 2015. Since then, my face has basically always looked the same. With the goal of getting as close as possible to the standard court design, I would also have to discard this drawing as well completely. But I'm so used to it, I can't and I don't want to.

However, yesterday I've achieved something that I tried for a long time, but where I always failed. For the length of the intro this must sound like a joke to you. But I think it shows you perfectly how much thoughts I put into every detail.

I've changed the eye(s) :D 

I've also straightened a few lines etc but the main detail is the eye. I found a way for myself how I can draw a face on a court but I'm not a caricaturist. That's why I often don't know which details are missing that make a person recognizable. And this was a huge problem that I had with my own card. I've tried a few things but I was never really happy with the result. But yesterday was one of these days again where the universe was on my side.

Hope you like it and thanks for reading.

Much love

Daniel