I’ve decided that the marble ink backs felt distracting from the cards. They didn’t sit well together. So each deck will have an individual back, scrutinising my favourite bits of some of the painted butterflies.
Sentimental Value…
13 MayAttached to the below notebook project on Nursing and Horoscopes (LINK)
These are my great aunties, Anne & Christina. Both professional nurses from the 1940s onwards. Anne brought my mother over from Ireland August 1979 and introduced her to Nursing which she still is to this day at the new Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham.
I’m also INCREDIBLY excited by getting CS6 Material Collection today. It’s working wonders.
Tags: 1940, 1979, anne behan, cs6, elizabeth, england, hospital, ireland, nursing, old photograph, photoshop, queen, sentiment
The Suits….
10 May
I’ve used different colours to define each suit. I quite miss the mixtures of colours that my original attempts had BUT I think this makes life a little easier for the user to define and recognise the relation to a normal deck of cards.
Tags: butterflies, deck of cards, suits
Materials #2
27 Apr
Second attempt. Going back to nursery skills here and folding paper with acrylic paints. YAY
I really enjoy these! I think the material is really playful yet beautiful. It’s a reminder of youth for me BUT after discussion in our Friday session with my tutor group I can also see the complications of using these for instance; the Card 10, with 10 multiples of one blurry mixed painted image could become obscured and no longer reflect the suit it’s in, colour’s could blur and become darker or lighter than I intended. I definitly want to use these somehow though. Maybe it isn’t appropriate for the face of the cards? I’ll have to begin experimenting with a dense card and my prints next.
Tags: acrylic, butterfly, cards, experiment, merged, paints, pattern, playing, print
Materials
27 Apr
I’ve begun experimenting with materials to create the butterflies for my playing cards. My first attempts were with Marble Inks.
The Marble Inks create an absolutely stunning abstract texture for my cards but don’t really contain the essence of butterflies which I was looking for. Being abstract this sort of ink could become extremely confusing when it comes to suits and sorting out a sense of hierarchy within each suit.
This COULD work for the back of my cards though.
Tags: butterflies, experiments, inks, marble, playing cards, prints
Playing Cards
27 Apr
Most people who play cards don’t realize that our modern deck of 52 cards is derived from the Tarot deck. In fact, the four suits correspond directly with the suits in Tarot.
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Tarot cards
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Playing cards
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Wands
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Clubs
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Cups
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===>
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Hearts
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Swords
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===>
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Spades
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Coins
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Diamonds
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The trump cards include powerful archetypes like the Sun, the Moon, the World, the Lovers, the Magician, etc. The suit cards correspond closely to the 52 cards in a playing card deck, except that in Tarot we have not only Queen and King face cards, we have Page and Knight cards for each suit, which were combined into the single Jack card as playing cards developed over time.
Some historians suggest that all card “games” were originally developed in part as a way to hide (from the medieval Church) the more serious application of the cards and symbols.
http://www.tarot.com/promos/tarot-and-playing-cards_04.php?code=belief&feature=tarot-playing-cards&
I can’t quite see how our modern playing cards fully derive from tarot cards as they both have pretty much separate uses. I’d imagine over evolution they’ve become simplified concerning the 2-10. The above comparisons of suits is really interesting but doesn’t really further me with my card production. The history was nice to know though.
Butterflies
26 AprButterfly life cycle:
Some larvae, especially those of the Lycaenidae, form mutual associations with ants. They communicate with the ants using vibrations that are transmitted through the substrate as well as using chemical signals. The ants provide some degree of protection to these larvae and they in turn gather honeydew secretions.
Many species of butterfly maintain territories and actively chase other species or individuals that may stray into them. Some species will bask or perch on chosen perches. The flight styles of butterflies are often characteristic and some species have courtship flight displays
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly
The benefit of being a social butterfly: communal roosting deters predation
Aposematic passion-vine butterflies from the genus Heliconius form communal roosts on a nightly basis. This behaviour has been hypothesized to be beneficial in terms of information sharing and/or anti-predator defence.
Social butterflies find safety in numbers
“We found there was a lot more predation on the single butterflies than on the groups,” says Finkbeiner, adding this supported the idea that the grouping was to fend off predators.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/03/21/3459526.htm
Tags: butterflies, research, social
D&AD: David Bailey
25 Apr
Tonight I went to the D&AD President’s Lecture Q&A with David Bailey @ Logan Hall. The night was spent sandwiched between good friends from Saint Martins and fashion photographer Rankin. Bailey was incredibly enjoyable and I managed to snag myself a picture with the man himself! He is an incredibly natural and down-to-earth person when it comes to his work. He is known as one of the leading pioneers of the “swinging” sixties yet didn’t want to include any of his incredible fashion photographs (God knows why) for the likes of British Vogue and The Rolling Stones. Instead, we enjoyed some of his commercials including this for Volkswagen;
One of the things that really struck me was his connection to simplicity and his use of stark black and white. To not be disillusioned or distracted by colour and backgrounds. To focus on the subject and only the subject is something that I’ve been learning to develop in my practise this past year. I want to create clean, to the point art. Purpose purpose purpose! It was fantastic to have such an ideal spoken back in such a prolific photographer and artist.
Tags: D&AD, david bailey, fashion, photographer, vogue, vw