I wanted to do an homage to the Cezanne’s painting “The Card Players 1894–1895”, one of the works that started the idea of Cubism in art history.

2 elements + 1 spontaneous idea = guardian of 4 spades. Actually, when we thought about 4 spades, the most obvious was to play with 2 elements: spade and number 4. We tried to get answers for the following: How to combine them? How to present them in the most creative way? How to make understandable for player to know which card he take in his hand even within watching in its value.

I choosed 5 Diamonds card and it was confirmed! I would like to play with the idea of building up a Jewel made of abstract clothes fluids full of energy in a sunset light background, where 5 energetic diamonds are the “power supply” to all this surreal machine.

I did a tiny bit of research about the symbolism of playing cards, it’s not the first time I played a bit with illustrating and interpreting cards. I have another series of works inspired by each of the Kings, of Clubs, Spades, Diamonds and Hearts, each with its own meaning, somehow overlapping with the four seasons. This time I illustrated The Seven of Clubs, and I read that the Sevens are the most spiritual cards of the deck, and this one in particular is connected with magic, creativity, spiritual knowledge. I was also inspired by the way the Seven of Wands in the Tarot cards looks like, with the seven sticks with tiny leaves on them. So I agreed to illustrate the Seven of Clubs as some sort of inspired magus, shaman, sitting, inhaling some magical vapors, with his eyes turned inside, surrounded by the seven wands, which in the Tarot card look very robust, very earthly, and in this illustration they bloom into these beautiful flowers. And visually I’m pretty fascinated and inspired by Islamic Art and Indian Miniatures lately, so the character is very reminiscent of that.

After creating almost exclusively animals for quite a while now, I wanted to do something else here. Earlier in my career I started with lots of portraits so I wanted to try this again - but with a lot more experience of course. I’ve also tried some little new things within my shading technique and I think it worked out quite well.

Wanted to have some fun with the diamond shape. Thought I’d incorporate it into the ’10’ as a structure.

The idea behind the artwork was to try not to illustrate a traditional Queen, I wanted to give her a more “natural” connotation, so I’ve tried to draw a crown made of abstract branches and twigs.