I’ve drawn the bodies of three starlings tangled in poppy plants. My card was the 3 of spades, and the suit of spades has always seemed ominous and dark to me — I frequently try to depict death and decay in a beautiful way in my drawings, and took this as an opportunity to continue that. I read that spades are the equivalent of the suits of swords and leaves in other types of decks, associated with the element of air, and sometimes symbolic of sickness and disappointment. I tried to take all of these factors into consideration when choosing my subject matter, as well as to create the composition out of groups of three — three starling, three large flowers, etc.

I like to explore the natural world, which also means discovering the more basic make-up of humans, wether in the throws of love or hate, possessed by loss and suffering or awake in a moment of peace. The girl in ‘Four of Hearts’ hunts for lovers like prey. It won’t be until her fourth victim perishes from the wound of her loving arrow, that she’ll realise that she can’t hunt for love, but embody it with peace and kindness and allow it to find her instead.

Jebus is equally awesome as Jesus but had a more rock and roll vibe to it. Jebus started out as a character of mine a year ago. I made 2 very detailed vector illustrations of him, now I’m sharing him with the rest of the world via this card.

I got inspired by the meaning behind the 6 of Club “Messenger’s Card” – Let me quote: “All Six of Club feel an obligation toward duty and they take their responsibilities seriously. Trouble is, the 6 of Club also symbolize inertia.” Essentially Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to any change in its motion (including a change in direction) from a physics perspective. In other words, it is the tendency of objects to keep moving in a straight line at constant linear velocity, or to keep still. The principle of inertia is one of the fundamental principles of classical physics that are used to describe the motion of objects and how they are affected by externally applied forces. In my example I wanted to combine my love to space/universe with one of the moments of inertia, in this case showing a sphere(shell).

I was very honored to be invited for the second time to be par of the collaborative project Playing Arts, where 54 extremely talented illustrators and designers together create a deck of playing cards. This year I got to draw 9 of Spades. I actually spent a lot of time thinking about the layout and how to position nine spade symbols in an interesting way and not to keep em flat. Here are some of the original sketches from the notebook. I didnt quite know which direction to go. I knew I wanted to have an isometric grid and play with 3 dimensions of it to position elements. First, I wanted to use shape on the number nine as a base and layout other elements around it. So I put together a grid in Photoshop and started to work around it. I also wanted to stick with just 2 colors this time too. At some point I decided to stick with a building idea and illustrate an utopian high rise apartment building that had an abandoned billboard on the roof top. I somehow saw the spades symbols as pills, so the banner shows three of them on the tongue. And number nine was treated in the other dimension/angle as a neon sign on the building, a welcome to a hotel or some other nasty joint.

The idea of my project was to work with an observation drawing and making a connection with the number of my card. So, I decided to draw my hands, where the sum of the fingers results in the number nine. To erase some parts of the drawing that I did not like, I used collage with craft paper.

I chose the Queen of hearts card because I thought that its the one that fits bettter with my style. Its very feminine, and I always like to draw female body and my muses.

The queen of diamonds was the subject that best fit with my subjects, in my gallery there are already a lot of ladies with geometrical shapes. I should make their queen. So I thought to a diamond near to me, a faceted diamond created by geometric games. It’s a rough diamond, as the young queen that I decide to create, dressed as a queen trough the jewelry, but under this crown there is still a child.