Black Remedies QH

I've made a few changes on the Queen of Hearts for the Black Remedies. Everything you see here on this one single card took me around six hours today. Think about it, all these extra hours of work just so that some fool will end up saying what a lazy color change the deck is. I'm so tired of explaining my art. However, I know most of it will stay unseen but at least you should know what's different.

Let's take a closer look at the face, compared to the last editions. The most obvious difference are the hair. I know, quite a few poeple like the dark hair but my goal is to stay as close as possible to the original court card design. I've also removed the hair strands to make it look cleaner.

Besides the hair I've changed the nose a bit. You can see that the left nostril is now seamlessly connected with the rest of the nose. If you look at a standard Bicycle Queen of Hearts you'll see that it looks exactly like that. The tip of the nose is a little bit more pointed to make it look less massive. Something about it bothered me in the old version.
I've also changed the size of the eyes. A detail which probably isn't visible at all on the first glance. But compare the distance of the eyebrow on the right and you can see it. I've added eyelashes. Or better just one eyelash... This is a very tiny but incredible important detail for every court card. The eyebrow on the right is also a tiny bit thicker now. I simply thought that would look better, even though it probably makes no differnece in print. The lips and chin / jawline got reshaped as well.

As you can imagine, I've spent an incredible amount of time in my life looking at court cards. Like that I've also noticed that the Queen of Hearts has some weird looking symbols on her body.

And is it just me or does the first symbol in the circle looks like a phallic symbol?

I've never understood these drawings but by looking at older playing card designs I figured it out and this really blew my mind... These are flower stems.

There are a lot details on court cards which got lost over centuries by redrawing them over and over again but that is a whole other topic for itself.

This is something that I wanted to change since quite a while already. I'm happy that I finally did and I'm even more happy with the result.

As you can see in the last image, I've also changed the flower in the hand. Not sure yet if I like it or not. :D But let me know what you think.

Thanks for being here with me.

Much love

Daniel