Wicked Kingdom - Illustrated Playing Cards by Wylie Beckert

THANK YOU! And the next steps...
over 8 years ago – Sat, Jul 23, 2016 at 12:56:59 AM

We're funded!! The Wicked Kingdom project closed with over $134k raised from over 3500 backers. I don't even know what to say other than a HUGE thank you to everyone who backed the project and helped spread the word - thanks to your support, Wicked Kingdom is one of the most-backed and highest-funded playing card projects of all time on Kickstarter!

If you missed the Kickstarter campaign, I've set up pre-orders for the decks and art books through Backerkit at https://wickedkingdom.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders. I'm planning to leave pre-orders open for at least a few weeks until the order counts from the Kickstarter are finalized.

The exact order numbers & size of the print runs will determine if/how many decks and books will be available for purchase after the Kickstarter pledges and Backerkit pre-orders are processed; I'm hoping to have extra copies to sell after all is said and done, but I can't guarantee it - so if your future happiness hinges on possessing a copy of Wicked Kingdom, the time is now!

And, if you're interested in purchasing prints or original artwork from the series, you can find available works in my shop at www.wickedkingdomdeck.com/wkshop

• It takes 2 weeks for Kickstarter to process all of your payments.

• Shortly thereafter, I'll be sending out Backerkit surveys by email - you'll use these surveys to supply your shipping address and select add-on items. I'll post another Kickstarter update to let you know when the surveys have gone out.

• Once I have the total item counts, I can place the orders for decks and art books.

• Limited edition print sets and original art will ship in August.

• If everything goes as planned the decks, art books, and postcard print packs should be shipping in November.

If we hit any unforeseen snags that throw off this shipping schedule, I'll post a Kickstarter update to keep you all informed.

The Wicked Kingdom deck was just the beginning! Your support has made my dream - illustrating my own ideas and creating my own projects - a financially viable reality... and there will be more to come soon. If you'd like to keep an eye on what I'm up to next, you can find me on:

• Facebook (I only post art stuff, never politics or cat pics! I've reached my friend request limit, but you can still follow me.)

• Instagram 

• Patreon (where you can support my art and get access to WIP images and process tutorials like the ones I've been including in these Kickstarter updates.)

Once again, THANK YOU! I can't wait to get this art into your hands.

Illustration Spotlight: The Black Fool
over 8 years ago – Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 08:38:31 PM

"THE BLACK FOOL: A recluse and guardian of the forestlands, who owes fealty to kings older and darker than the crowned fools who squabble over their little patches of earth.

Over the course of many lifetimes passed in the forest, he has unlocked its secrets, yet has shared them with but a few; for those to whom the old tongue is not yet lost, he is a teller of tales older than the four kingdoms, and a keeper of histories forgotten even to the stone-speakers in their mountain temples."

Check out notes and snapshots from the creation of the painting below! Many thanks to my supporters on Patreon for making this tutorial content possible.

While I designed the Red Fool to tie in with the Hearts and Diamonds suits, the Black Fool needed to harmonize with the Clubs and Spades suit. I wanted to use the jokers to explore the contrast between the black suits (associated with nature, plants, and animals) and the red suits (religion, science, civilization) - so it seemed fitting that since the Red Fool is a wanderer and world traveler, the Black Fool should be a hermit and a recluse shut off from society.

I took inspiration from the traditional depiction of the Hermit in tarot cards (a flowing cloak, and a card raised high like a lamp) and, because the Spades and Clubs suits are associated with plants and forests, from the archetype of the Green Man from pagan mythology. I pictured the Black Fool as an eternal warden of the forests, who has lived so long that his own language has fallen out of use - leaving his wisdom to be dismissed as ramblings.

I use a lightbox to transfer a printout of the enlarged thumbnail to a sheet of Bristol paper using a red Col-Erase pencil. This was one of those rare pieces where the rough sketch came together fairly quickly, with few major changes to the thumbnail and only a minimal amount of cursing.  

 I work directly over the rough sketch in mechanical pencils - tightening up the drawing, adding details, and beginning to build the value structure. I work in small sections, finishing each area before moving on to the next - I've found this is the best way to tackle a large pencil drawing without losing focus.

 I work over a print of my pencil art on toned paper, wet-stretched on a homemade paper stretcher. I ink the print of the drawing with a mix of brown and black acrylic ink. If I was painting directly over a pencil drawing, I'd tend to skip this step; but because I'm working over a low-opacity print, I have to pretty much replicate the entire drawing in ink. While the effect is a little bit different, I've always felt that the effort is worthwhile. 

I finish off the underpainting with a wash of greenish-yellow watercolor to brighten up the neutral gray of the paper.  

 I build lighting and a sense of dimensionality with white charcoal pencils; these are a really great tool because of the wide range of light tones they can produce. They also give the piece a really nice texture that will show through subsequent layers of oil paint.

I seal the underpainting/drawing with a few coats of matte medium (diluted and sprayed on) and a few more coats brushed on at full strength before moving on.

 I mix a dark, transparent olive green tone, thinned with walnut oil, and brush it over all but the lightest areas of the painting. Using a paper towel, I blend the paint into the surface until I have a soft, even midtone covering most of the image.

 I use a kneaded eraser to pull the wet paint out of the highlights - revealing the lighter ink/white charcoal underpainting, and unlocking a wider range of values.

Using the same mix as the base tone and a tiny round brush, I re-trace some of the major outlines and details, and build up the thickness of the paint layer in the darkest areas. I make sure to leave some of the ink outlines mostly untouched, especially in softer areas like the face. I let these base layers dry completely before moving on to the glazes. 

I paint the skin tones first, since these are usually a bit trickier to get right, and will effect my choices for the rest of the color scheme. I start with a thin wash of yellow - which looks way too bright initially, but once blended with a paper towel becomes much more subtle against the brownish-green underpainting. A reddish-brown hue, blended into the yellow glaze at the edges and very center of the face, knocks back the yellow even further and creates a fairly lifelike skin tone.

 While the glazes are still wet, I paint in a few tiny highlights in an opaque off-white.

My final glazes are shades of blue and purple to the clothing and lower background corners. Applied in a subtle gradient, the two hues create the illusion of iridescence for the crow-feather cloak.  

The white highlights for this round are much more subtle - I mix my white with a fair amount of blue and purple pigments - even the lightest highlights in the black cloak can't stray too far into the range of the lighter values without disrupting the value structure of the piece.  

This tutorial content wouldn't be possible without my supporters on Patreon - thanks guys!

Illustration Spotlight: Card Back
over 8 years ago – Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 09:29:47 PM

Less than 48 hours left in the campaign! I've been continually astounded by the number of backers that have been pouring in this week, and I can't say it enough: thank you all so much for believing in this project!

I'll be unveiling the final joker on the last day of the campaign; for now, here's an unsung but crucial piece of the deck: the card back! Some notes and snapshots from the painting process below:

  The card back: another dangerously open-ended concept. I wanted to create a design that would fill the space well, and include elements that echoed the content of the face cards. Skulls, crowns, seeds, and leaves became my focus - heavily inspired by the Spades suit, which is my favorite overall (plus, the intricately detailed foliage it features seemed like a prime candidate for an all-over decorative pattern).

While the design started with my usual ultra-simple thumbnail sketch, I knew the execution of this artwork was going to be vitally important to the look of the deck; so, rather than diving right in with the pencil art, I fleshed out my thumbnail sketch digitally, making sure I had square borders and perfect symmetry between the halves - I wanted to leave as little to chance as possible.

I printed my thumbnail sketch at full size, and used a lightbox to transfer the layout to a sheet of Bristol paper using a red Col-Erase pencil... 

...then worked the final pencil drawing on top.

Because I was planning to create a fully-reversible design, I'd originally planned to draw only half the pencil art. However, partway through the drawing I decided the card back needed dark and light halves - just like the card backs.  

I chose a crow for the reversed motif to balance the skull; although the shapes of the skull and the crow were quite different, I used the skull I'd roughed in to guide the placement of key shapes and details in the crow. I didn't want the double-sided design to be an instant read, but rather something that would become apparent on closer inspection.

I scan my finished drawing; to save time, I've only drawn half of the reversible parts of the design. I mirror and adjust the image to create the full card back, then print it out at reduced opacity on a sheet of tinted Canson pastel paper. To prepare the print for water media, I soak the paper and wet-stretch it on a paper stretcher (tutorial here)...  

  ...Then apply thin washes of acrylic ink to build up the values in the darkest areas of the card.

 I decided I didn't like the look on the skull's face at this stage, so I went back in with pencil to make some minor adjustments - mostly reshaping the eye socket/brow area, and adding a little bit more structure to the forms.

 Then, I ink the lineart with a small round brush and a mix of brown and black acrylic ink. While I want the image to have a good amount of visual symmetry, I'm not worried about tiny deviations. Working over the perfectly mirrored print of the sketch provides enough of a framework to keep things reasonably consistent between the halves.

 I use white charcoal pencils to create highlights and the illusion of depth, as well as to add tiny details and textures. Since most of my process just involves broad washes of color, this is the one stage in the final painting where I can really zoom in and add interest to the image. If I've started to lose any of the personality of the hand-drawn pencil art under all the inking, this allows me to bring it back.

As you can probably imagine, we go through a lot of white charcoal pencils around here!

 Because I want the card back to have a neutral, monochromatic color scheme (so as not to clash with the various bright colors of the suits), I use a desaturated greenish brown for the base layer (achieved by mixing Transparent Brown Oxide and Prussian Blue). I brush on a thin coat over all but the lightest areas of the piece, then blend with a paper towel for a thin, even layer...

 ...out of which I can pull highlights with a kneaded eraser. I focus on the midtone areas and focal points at this stage, leaving the darkest areas mostly untouched; the white charcoal highlights will show through the oil layer in a subtle, knocked-back way that doesn't steal too much attention.

Switching back to a tiny round brush, I go over the lineart in the darkest areas - while I use kneaded erasers to define the highlights in ligher areas, here I'm allowing the base tone to become my "light" in dark areas by pushing the darks darker with more oil paint. This helps keep the overall value structure defined, and keeps everything from devolving into a mess of high-contrast detail work.

For the very lightest areas, I paint in tiny touches of opaque white.  

 Normally this is where I'd call the image finished; while I like the final image as a standalone painting, it feels a little heavy on the empty white space for a card back. 

Since I'm not a fan of direct oil painting, and there's no way to go back into the mixed-media layers of the painting to start over, I make my adjustments digitally, adding some additional decoration to the center of the image in Photoshop. I also add a few touches of gold on Color, Multiply, and Overlay layers to help integrate the card back with the more colorful look of the rest of the deck.

Illustration Spotlight: The Red Fool
over 8 years ago – Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 11:24:31 PM

 "THE RED FOOL: A former novitiate of the diamond temple, she has abandoned her calling and left her training unfinished. Half-sighted and half-learned, she wanders the four kingdoms bearing only a few meager possessions, and the stolen scrolls of wisdom whose language she can read but whose portents she cannot hope to decipher.

For one who might have been a speaker of prophesies and custodian of untold secrets, she has fallen far - becoming a charlatan and proselytizer for false gods, a teller of petty fortunes and a dealer in various low trades."

Check out some notes & work-in-progress photos from the creation of the painting below!

 Since the Jokers are typically one-way card illustrations (unlike the rest of the face cards), I wanted to approach the layout designs for these final cards a little bit differently. I thought it would be neat to incorporate the same rectangular border that frames all of the face cards, but have the Jokers escaping their frames and climbing out into our "real" world.

I also wanted each joker to share a connection with two of the suits - in this case, Hearts and Diamonds. Because both of these suits are associated in their own ways with religion and ritual, I was picturing the Red Fool as a priestly character, complete with an extravagant hat reminiscent of a bell tower.

I made a few digital edits to my initial thumbnail sketch - partly to tweak the style of the clothing (I felt like a more tattered, fringed look for the garments made for a more traditional Joker character), and partly to adjust the angle of the head - the downturned face of my original sketch seemed too solemn for what I hoped to develop as a more roguish character.

 I print my adjusted thumbnail at full size and transfer it via lightbox to a sheet of Bristol paper using a red Col-Erase pencil. I start with a very rough lay-in, then start to build up the forms and nail down the details of the face and clothing. I aim for a fairly finished Col-Erase drawing before I bring in traditional graphite.

 I finish out the drawing with mechanical pencils; I always start with the face, and don't move on to the rest of the drawing until I've gotten it right - a subpar face will almost always take the impact out of a character illustration.

 I work over a low-opacity print of my pencil art on toned paper, wet-stretched to prevent buckling). I start by inking the drawing with a mix of brown and black acrylic ink...

I'm not 100% sure what I'll be doing with the color scheme at this stage; since shades of red and purple (to tie in with the Hearts and Diamonds color schemes) seemed like the obvious choice, I put down a thin wash of watercolor in these shades. I'm not being overly cautious with the distribution of color here - it's mainly just to help me visualize the direction I'll be going in moving forward. As it turns out, I'm not crazy about the red/purple direction, so I'll be switching things up in a little bit.

Working over the dried ink/watercolor layers, I use white charcoal pencil to build up the light areas of the piece and add details, textures, and the illusion of lighting to the piece. The amount of work I need to do varies depending on what I'm trying to accomplish - the smooth planes of the face have only a few touch of white charcoal...

 While the fringed shawl needs some pretty extensive texturing to "read" properly. Once I have everything the way I like it, I seal the underpainting/drawing with a few coats of matte medium (diluted and sprayed on) and a few more coats at full strength.

I don't worry about the final colors with the first layers of oil paint - instead, I'm just laying down a deeper tone to push my values darker overall. I choose a fairly neutral, transparent greenish-brown mix, applied over all but the lightest areas of the piece and blended with a paper towel.

 While the paint is still wet, I use a kneaded eraser to pull the pigment out of the highlights, revealing the lighter ink/watercolor underpainting beneath.

 I use a tiny round brush to touch up the lineart and push the values even darker. I work with the same greenish brown mix I used for the base tone, and blend the harsher lines with a clean brush to keep the look somewhat soft.

I build the final color scheme with thin, transparent glazes applied over the completely dried base tone. By now, I've decided on a color scheme of rust reds and golds. I apply paint with a large flat brush, blending the paint with a paper towel for lighter coverage in bright areas and applying it more thickly in dark areas.

I also paint some opaque white highlights directly into the wet glazes, blending their edges to pick up a little bit of the color of the glazes. 

I'd originally planned to keep the elaborate hat a neutral color, but felt that it was too similar to the parchment color of the playing cards the character is flourishing. I apply a bright gold to the areas nearest the focal points, and blend well into the surface to create some subtle transitions between high- and low-saturation areas.  

  I let the first round of glazes dry for a few days while I consider what to do next. I finally settle on a purer, more saturated red for the cloak - applied quite thinly, and blended well with a paper towel. The final glaze knocks back the brighter highlights from the previous layers, and unifies the values nicely.

[Huge thanks to my backers on Patreon for making this tutorial content possible! You can check out the rest of the tutorials for the deck (and keep an eye on whatever I'll be up to next) at http://www.patreon.com/wyliebeckert )

Illustration Spotlight: The Ace of Clubs (with painting process video!)
over 8 years ago – Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 07:50:51 PM

 Three days left, and we've hit $100k in funding! I'm thrilled at how far this project has come! Three small notes/requests for my amazing backers:

1) I'm trying to get the word out to as many people as possible before the close of the campaign; if you're as excited about the card deck as I am, this is an awesome time to share the project around on social media. Your Facebook shares have been the lifeblood of this campaign and I can't thank you enough for helping to spread the word!

2) I've had a number of people ask if the decks will be available for purchase after the Kickstarter. While I'm hoping to print a few more decks than I need to fulfill Kickstarter orders, I can't stock a huge number of them (tiny studio apartment here!) and reprints will be a costly endeavor. So, short answer: while this isn't a strictly limited-edition deck, I can't guarantee availability after the campaign; backing the Kickstarter will be the best way to ensure you'll be able to get your hands on a copy of the deck. (Same goes for the art books.)

3) A reminder that the holiday season will follow close on the heels of the target fulfillment date for the project (we're aiming to ship in November), and that playing cards are great in stockings and alongside Festivus poles... while a ton of you have already pledged for a single copy, it never hurts to have an extra deck or two around :)

Finally, here's the capstone of the Wicked Kingdom suits: The Ace of Clubs! Check out some notes, snapshots, and a video of the painting process below (many thanks to my supporters on Patreon for making these tutorials possible!).

"Behind its impenetrable walls, the Kingdom of Clubs exists in a state of perpetual readiness; for its people have not yet forgotten the turmoil and bloodshed from which their sovereignty was forged.

The kingdom's purposeful isolation has fostered an insular and unwelcoming society. Its people are said to speak the tongues of animals more readily than those of outsiders; as such, the Kingdom of Clubs is known less from firsthand accounts and more from legends - most of which populate its walls with everything from skinwalkers to berserkers. All accounts agree, however, on a few less sensational points: the kingdom's unforgiving class system honors valor over birthright; its armories are without equal; and the royal bestiaries are a rare jewel containing living specimens of every creature in the four kingdoms."

 This was one of those designs that just felt obvious to me, and came together without the usual struggle. The clubs suit has been one of the most fun to paint - all those scaly and furry textures, fun weapon designs, and PANGOLINS! I recycled some of my favorite elements from the suit to create an ace befitting the warlike Kingdom of Clubs...

 My thumbnail is an ultra-rough pencil sketch; scanned, enlarged, and adjusted ever so slightly for visual balance and approximate symmetry in Photoshop. I print my adjusted sketch, and use a lightbox and Col-Erase pencil to transfer the rough drawing to a sheet of Bristol.

The Col-Erase sketch serves to rough in the exact placement of the elements, and lets me begin to add some volume to the shapes I've outlined. For example, the pangolin tail is starting to get some cross-contour lines to define its shape - many of these lines won't be visible in the final drawing, but they help with the placement of surface details (such as scales) and lend some believability to the forms). 

 Once I have the Col-Erase sketch the way I like it, I switch over to mechanical pencils for the graphite rendering.

I print a low-opacity copy of my pencil art on toned paper, and wet-stretch it using gummed paper tape and gatorboard to prevent buckling.

 I ink the drawing with a 4:1 mix of brown and black acrylic ink and a small round brush... no real surprises here - I'm just trying to recapture the energy of the pencil drawing and provide a solid, intricately detailled base layer for the rest of the painting.

A few watercolor washes establish the color scheme for the painting; on top of them, I use a white charcoal pencil to add highlights, sculpt the forms, and play up the textures of the scales.

I seal the finished underpainting with a few coats of diluted matte medium in a spray bottle, then brush on a few more full-strength coats to protect the paper from the oil paint.

My initial layer of oil paint is a golden brown mix thinned slightly with walnut oil. I use a flat brush to dab paint into all but the lightest areas of the piece, then blend with a paper towel to soften the edges and create a thin, even midtone. Using kneaded erasers, I clean up any paint that's blended over the lines into the background, and pick out the brightest areas (the skull, the fur, the highlights on the scales), revealing the lighter underpainting below.  

  Switching back to a tiny round brush, I deepen the base layer in the darkest areas, and add emphasis the inked line art. I'm mainly focusing on the big stuff - major outlines, heavy shadows - and leaving the interior details soft and inky.

 I let the first round of oil paint dry completely - just a few days for this piece, since I've worked in such thin layers - before glazing in the color. A mix of warm and cool blues, thinned down with walnut oil, adds some saturated color to the light areas, while creating a nice neutral blackish tone where the brown underpainting is the heaviest. I use a few very thin glazes of pure yellow to the metal and ribbon details, and blend it very sparingly into the pangolin scales for a more subtle effect.

I use a tiny brush to paint highlights into the wet glaze using opaque white oil paint and just a bit of walnut oil. For softer highlights, I blend the edges with a clean brush.