One

I choose 3 of hearts cause i really like this card (don´t ask me why). The idea was that it will be three hearts on the card, so i decided to draw a good one. The girl on the card is a good friend of mine.

Using a familiar process whereby I let the materials dictate the piece – ’3 of Diamonds’ plays with the effects of optical distortion looking at glass or diamond as a metaphor for altered reality. The girl is lost within her distorted world, a world which is created and contained by her own thoughts.

I always have been fascinated by 70’s icons and stuff, so I was looking through images that may inspire me or give me an idea for this card. At the same time, I started sketching trying to come up with ideas. Then I remembered there was this old movie from the 70’s called “Unholy rollers”. I love the look of these vintage girls, so this, obviously, is what made me come up with the idea of a roller fighting to be the best of the 6 hearts while she defeat the rest of these girls. Maybe she is trying to give her heart to you ;) I then collected a bunch of documentation images… I finally made the final sketch. This is one of the most important parts. …and finally the technique application. In this case, watercolour. Done!

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.

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.

Poker is a game where the details and wit are present, each person pretends to have something that basically does not have , and do not want other players to know who has, or otherwise. With this work what I understand , in this case, is that the monster could not impersonate authentic king , however great the crown, it is not a king, is a monster who only thinks about eating and drooling.