Wicked Kingdom - Illustrated Playing Cards by Wylie Beckert

Illustration Spotlight: The Jack of Clubs
over 8 years ago – Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 01:08:51 AM

"THE JACK OF CLUBS: a deserter who, having lost his taste for war, finds himself exiled and disgraced - condemned to live as a recluse and poach the dark forests of the borderlands for whatever prey he might find there.

There are few enough left now who remember his time at the right hand of the king who fostered and trained him; but for his own part, he still he dreams of blood, and smoke, and his lost place in the walled kingdom - a position to which he has not entirely abandoned hope of restoring himself. His final chance at redemption: a treasured and elusive prey, the hunting of which will require all the skills at his disposal..."

Check out some notes & snapshots from the creation of the Jack of Clubs below!

I had a very vague idea of what I wanted to do for at least one side of the Jack of Clubs - I thought he should be a hunter from the borderlands (to tie in with the Queen's story) who somehow encounters the Queen. I tried out a few rough sketches before settling on a composition I liked...

 As luck would have it, the first side of my thumbnail sketch gave me some thematic ideas for the reversed character. To balance out the (large) bear trap on one side, the expression of the hands on the other side needed to occupy a lot of space. I realized that a claw-like hand pose could echo the teeth of the bear trap, but what to put inside them? Bait to catch a Bear Queen - and with the idea of a ring, the reversed character became a suitor. This opened up all sorts of possibilities for the character's background and motivations, which gave me a lot of ideas to play with.

Since my thumbnail was a little rough for this card, I had to do a bit more invention at the rough sketch stage than usual. I printed my thumbnail out at full size and transferred the general layout via lightbox to a sheet of Bristol. From there, I started building a more structured sketch in Col-Erase.

 One of the trickier elements about the reversible card layouts is getting the faces consistent, especially since they're often seen from different angles or with different expressions. While in an ideal world I'd be taking nice clear reference photos of a single model from the appropriate angles, my process is usually a lot more haphazard.

One thing that often helps is to outline a simple geometric shape that encloses some of the major features and planes of the face; it's sometimes easier to visualize a simplified shape like this tilting and rotating in space, rather than trying to do the same thing with all the complexity of an entire face.

 With the Col-Erase sketch finished, I use mechanical pencils to tighten up the drawing and finish rendering the piece. A lot of small details that support the storyline come into play at this stage (for example, he's a military deserter - so the club symbol on his medallion has been scratched out; on the reverse side, the medallion is missing entirely. Wonder where he got the metal to forge that ring...). 

Some of these details are probably obscure enough that no one but me will ever notice them (let alone connect them to the storyline) but they help me build the narrative for the character.

 To preserve my original pencil drawing, I work over a giclee print of my art on tinted paper. I prepare the print by wetting the paper and stretching it on a homemade paper stretcher to prevent buckling with subsequent layers of water media.

 Using a small round brush and a mix of black and brown acrylic ink, I ink the drawing - building up the tones and lines that will appear in the final image. I always feel like the quality of the lines aren't as nice in ink as they are in pencil, but luckily the next stage brings back some of the precision that I can only get in pencil.

 I use a wash of blue watercolor to liven up the grayish tone of the paper, and add a little bit of yellow to the accents.

 Once the ink is dry, I go in with white charcoal pencil to build up the lightest areas and add detail. I definitely go overboard with highlighting at this stage, because subsequent layers of oil paint will do a lot to knock things back again.

Since both white charcoal and watercolor will lift and dissolve with overpainting, I seal the underpainting with a few coats of matte medium before moving on.

For my initial coat of oil paint I use a mix of transparent brown and indian yellow (thinned with walnut oil) for a warm brown that will set off the final blue & gold color scheme without dulling it down too much. I dab the paint on all but the lightest areas of the piece, and blend with a paper towel until I have a thin, even layer across the entire piece.

I use a small piece of kneaded eraser to dab the paint out of lighter areas of the piece. Midtones can be lightened a little bit with paper towels, and the very lightest highlights can be achieved with multiple passes of the eraser. I really like this stage for it ability to unify values (contrast will be softened considerably under a layer of dark oil paint) and create a sense of lighting.

With a small brush, I use the same paint I mixed for the base tone to build up the darkest areas, touch up outlines, and enhance any tiny details that may have gotten lost in the base tone. I allow this layer to dry completely (at least a few days) before moving on – if a paper towel rubbed on the surface picks up any pigment, the layers aren't dry enough to take additional oil work without lifting.

 I use a mix of dark, transparent blue for the initial oil glaze. Thinned with walnut oil, this adds some intense color to lighter areas; I can apply it more heavily for a near-black shade wherever it's layered over the brown base tone. This gives me a chance to push some of the darker values and restore contrast to details concealed under the oil base tone. 

While the glaze is still wet, I use a tiny round brush to add small highlights and details in slightly blue-tinted white, also thinned with walnut oil.

I repeat the process in yellow, adding saturated washes of color to metalwork and other bright details. I make sure to leave some areas (like the band of trim in the center below) un-glazed as a counterpoint to the brighter tones - this (hopefully!) keeps the color scheme from getting too garish. In areas where I want a bit of color, but the yellow is too strong (like the bear trap), I use a slightly duller mix of yellow and Alizarin Crimson for a rusty color.

I also work in a few more tiny highlights and details - mostly highlights to add texture to armor and scales - with yellowish-white oils and a very tiny brush. 

The Royal Family of Clubs is finished! 

Project Shoutout: Legal Tender (and a preview of the Jokers!)
over 8 years ago – Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 11:36:28 PM

Tomorrow will mark one week until the close of the campaign, and we're spectacularly poised to hit $90k - five times the initial funding goal. I keep saying it, but THANK YOU! Not only for your (wildly appreciated) pledges, but also for helping to spread the word about the project - your likes & shares have pushed the campaign far past what I could have hoped to reach on my own.

We're not done with the art yet, either! The paint is still drying on the Jokers; I'm hoping to have the final illustrations scanned & ready to unveil soon, but in the meantime, here's a sneak peek at the two characters:

 

I also wanted to take a moment to mention another project that's currently on Kickstarter - my card art mentor and overall idol Jackson Robinson's Legal Tender.

Jackson is a card artist who has launched 15+ successful Kickstarters; back when I first started illustrating my card deck (and had no idea which way was up), Jackson reached out to me with advice & guidance; so much of the Wicked Kingdom project is based on the framework he laid with his past projects that I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge him here!

Jackson's current project, Legal Tender, is a series of playing cards based on currency designs from around the world; his first wave of designs include US and Chinese currency. Like all of Jackson's decks, they're gorgeous and painstaking designs - if you're a fan of cards, money, or any combination of the two (and who isn't) check them out at:

 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1722808047/legal-tender-currency-inspired-playing-cards .

Illustration Spotlight: The Queen of Clubs
over 8 years ago – Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 11:52:46 PM

Wow, it's been a huge couple of days for the campaign - hello and welcome to all the new backers from Reddit! When I started working on the art for this deck almost two years ago, I had a lot of doubts as to whether anyone would even notice (let alone put down their hard-earned money to own a copy). The support that keeps flooding in against all expectations has been an insanely validating experience; thank you all so much for believing in this project!

Here's the latest (and probably my favorite) card, the Queen of Clubs - check out some notes & snapshots from the painting process below...

"THE QUEEN OF CLUBS, or so she might have one day become - destined to cover her face and sit by the fire among her aunts, or die in childbirth like her mother - had she not forged her own war-club and followed the tracks of a foundling she-bear into the forest beyond her father's high walls.

None can say for certain what became of her, although there are hunters from the borderlands who claim to have seen her among the trees: a warrior maiden clad in iron and ragged pelts, more animal than human, with lichen on her armor and wildfire in her eyes. Legend names her the Bear Queen, and only the very brave or very foolish would venture to set a snare in her woods."

 For this card, my initial concept was a little more vague than usual at the planning stage. I initially thought that the Queen of Clubs might be a goddess of the hunt, or a trophy collector; but I didn't have a clear idea of how to fit either of these themes into the dual-identity format.

Having more or less drawn a blank on how to proceed, I started sketching my thumbnail without a very clear concept in mind - basically just getting a handle on the visual layout, semi-confident that a clearer theme would emerge as I worked. (As you can see, the thumbnail includes wolves, skulls, and horns that didn't make the final cut.) This is a dangerous tactic, but sometimes it's the only way to forge ahead in the face of artist's block.

 The underdrawing begins as a simple tracing of my thumbnail sketch (scanned, enlarged, and printed; then transferred to a sheet of Bristol with a lightbox). From here, I start to hone the image in Col-Erase pencil - figuring out the details and cross-checking the pose and anatomy against reference snapshots.

 At this point, a concept started to emerge. In my thumbnail, I'd intended to include a pair of wolves as the animal sidekicks for the upright side of the card; as the character got larger and more imposing, though, I decided that a bear would be more appropriate.

When I moved to the reversed side of the card, I felt like I needed something bear-related to create a link between the two faces of the character. I considered a bear skull (tying in with my initial idea of a trophy collector), but it seemed like this would confuse which was the dark side of the character, and which the light. I hit on the idea of a pet bear cub, which finally established a clear contrasting theme for the two sides - "tame" on one side, and "wild" on the other.

 Once I have the rough Col-Erase sketch nailed down, it's just a matter of going over the drawing in mechanical pencil - tightening things up, building values, and adding detail.

 Since painting directly on top of my slaved-over pencil drawing (right) would probably make me cry, I use a giclee print of the pencil art on toned paper (left). Using water media on paper has its challenges; I make things a little easier for myself by wet-stretching the paper before I start painting.

An initial light wash of blue watercolor helps establish the overall color scheme. Once dry, I ink the drawing with a mix of brown and black acrylic ink and a small round brush (you can see the difference between the inked drawing and the untouched print in the snapshot below). I've found that if I'm working directly over a pencil drawing, this step is unnecessary; however, printed lineart has a tendency to disappear under a few layers of paint, so the opacity of inking makes all the difference here. 

Since the final image will be two-toned, I paint in some accents of bright yellow. I'll be pushing this color scheme further at the oil stage, but starting to build it in watercolor (which is somewhat reversible) lets me troubleshoot the colors early - checking that the distribution of yellow details is balanced between the two halves, and making sure there are no confusing overlaps or tangents between areas of color.  

 Over the dried underpainting, I start to build up the lighter tones and fine details in white charcoal pencil. The effect is a little hard to capture in photos, but the white charcoal has a way of sitting on top of the dull midtones and adding a lot of depth to the image.

 Before I do anything else, I seal the image. While you can use any fixative whose staying power you're confident in, I've found that matte medium (diluted by half and misted on with a small spray bottle) is the best solution for setting the watercolor and white charcoal without dissolving either of them. Three light coats is usually plenty.

To offset the blue underlay and warm up the skin tones, I add a final layer of thin reddish washes to the face and hands, then spray with a few more coats of matte medium. To seal the surface in preparation for oil paint, I brush on three coats of matte medium at full strength. 

 All the detail I've put into the underdrawing and underpainting will pretty much carry the piece from this point; but the final layers of oil paint deepen the values and enhance the color scheme.

I start the oil painting with a mix of Transparent Brown and Indian Yellow, 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.

I use a kneaded eraser to pick the wet paint out of highlights and reveal the lighter underpainting beneath. As you may have noticed, there's a lot of this push-and-pull to my process: building up dark tones, then knocking them back with highlights. It can get a little bit tedious, but I really like the layered approach and the subtle effects you can get from it.

 Using the paint I mixed for the base tone, I build up some of the dark, solid areas and go over some of the outlines with a small round brush. I try not to simply repeat the inking process at this stage - I mostly focus on the major outlines (and key details like the eyes), and let the softer inked lines show through in the rest of the painting.

 I let the first round of oil paint dry completely - anywhere from a few days for this piece to up to a week if I've used slower-drying pigments - before glazing in the color. I start with a mix of warm and cool blue tones, thinned with slightly more walnut oil than I used for the base tone.

Since blue over brown produces a pretty decent near-black, I'm able to use these glazes not only to add color to light areas, but also to deepen the values in the darkest areas like the hair and background.

 I use a tiny brush to paint highlights into the wet glaze. For softer highlights, I blend the edges with a clean brush.

 To keep the colors from mixing, I let the blue glaze dry completely before repeating the process with bright yellow, dulled around the edges with a little bit of Alizarin Crimson.

 Once again, I paint white highlights into the glaze, and blend as needed.

 With the yellow tones in place, I can get a slightly better idea of the overall relationship between warm and cool tones. Alongside the bright yellow, the skin tones look a little grayish; I apply a very thin reddish glaze to the edges of the arms and face, and blend towards the center with a clean brush.

 This was the point where I started congratulating myself on being finished; but after scanning the painting and putting it side-by-side with the King of Clubs, I realized that there was a lot more blue in the King - by comparison, the Queen looked like more of a monochromatic yellow painting. One last bright blue glaze to the armor and costume makes the pair a better match. Now it's actually finished!

Illustration Spotlight: The King of Clubs
over 8 years ago – Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 01:00:37 AM

Only ten days left until the close of the Kickstarter campaign! This has been an insanely exciting couple of weeks - I still can't believe we're coming up on the 75k mark (no matter how many times I refresh the page to convince myself it's true). Thank you once again for backing the project and helping to spread the word - your social media shares have pretty much singlehandedly made this campaign what it is today!

If any of you amazing people are in the mood to drop an image or two from the project on Facebook in these final days, it's hard to go wrong with the well-guarded King of Clubs... His story (and some notes from the mixed-media painting process) below.

"THE KING OF CLUBS, whose kingdom's enduring peace was bought with steel and blood. The few remaining souls who have faced him on the field of battle tell strange stories of teeth and claws, of warriors who eat human flesh and wear the skins of fabulous beasts.

His current life is one of quiet diplomacy behind high walls; his far-seeing eyes, though, are always trained on the uneasy world beyond his guarded borders. In his armories, the forge-fires are never permitted to go out, and his beast-skin armor is never allowed to lose its polish."

 I was uncommonly torn as to what direction to take for this one - a classic case of the Curse of the Open-Ended Prompt. I knew the Clubs suit had to be warriors but, since human history has included bashing things with blunt instruments at virtually every time period and in every corner of the world, there were a lot of disparate sources of inspiration to draw from.

In my hunt for visual influences, I came across a reference book containing images of historical arms & armor, including clubs and maces of all varieties. A particularly evil-looking spiky one caught my eye; it reminded me vaguely of a hedgehog, and got me thinking about armored animals - amongst whom, naturally, the pangolin is king. I liked the idea of a beast-king who would wear animal armor into battle.

 In the end, the King of Clubs developed as a hero, diplomat, and peacekeeper on one face, and a berserker dressed in animal skins on the other.

 No surprises here - the thumbnail is scanned, scaled to size, and printed; I use a lightbox to transfer the layout to a sheet of Bristol with Col-Erase pencil. This is normally where I'd labor over the rough sketch stage (with that same Col-Erase) to get all the details just right before moving on to graphite. This time, though, I got cocky and jumped right into the detail work in graphite - and it actually worked for the sinister side. Sadly, though, that's where my luck ran out.

 As you can see in the sketch above, the benevolent king and pangolin both underwent some major stylistic revisions along the way - always a risky proposition, since paper can only take so much erasing. (You'd think I would have learned my lesson from doing the same damn thing with the King of Hearts, but alas...)

I did at last settle on faces for both king and pangolin. Better than the originals? Worse? Hard to say, but since there's no going back now, let's assume the former.

  To preserve my original pencil drawing, I work over a giclee print of my art on tinted paper. I prepare the print by wetting the paper and stretching it on a homemade paper stretcher to prevent buckling with subsequent layers of water media.

Since the gray paper I'm using can dull the final colors somewhat, I add an initial wash in blue watercolor, and use a damp sea sponge to pull the pigment out of areas I want to remain neutral or plan on pushing towards warmer tones.

Once the wash has dried, I ink the underdrawing with a mix of brown and black acrylic ink and a small round brush.

 Once the ink is dry, I go in with white charcoal pencil to build up the lightest areas and add detail. Since both white charcoal and watercolor will lift and dissolve with overpainting, I seal the underpainting with three coats of spray matte medium before moving on.

 While I've been using fairly monochromatic color schemes for the other cards, I wanted to play with a two-tone effect on this one - so, once the ink is dry, I add some saturated yellows and oranges to the armor in watercolor. 

 This dulls some of the highlights, so I touch them up with more white charcoal pencil. All of this is sealed with three coats of spray matte medium, then another three coats (brushed on) to protect the paper from oil paint at the next stage.

 After wrestling with a strongly-colored base tone for the King of Hearts, I felt like keeping things a little more neutral for this painting. I mix up a base tone of transparent brown, indian yellow, and walnut oil, then dab it on all but the lightest areas of the piece.

Using a blue paper towel, I blend the base tone into the surface. This thins the coating on the darkest areas somewhat, and adds a soft tint to the midtones. I try to keep the lightest areas as paint-free as possible.

Now comes the fun part: picking out the base tone to reveal glimpses of the lighter watercolor underpainting beneath. Originally, I'd use a brush dipped in solvent to pull up the highlights at this stage in my process; however, I recently found a way better tool: kneaded erasers!

I'd been using kneaded erasers in my pencil drawings for ages, but had never realized that they're capable of picking up oil paint as well as graphite. I use the erasers while the paint is still wet, starting with a small piece of new, clean eraser and switching it out regularly (they lose their tackiness as they begin to fill up with paint). 

With a small brush, I use the same paint I mixed for the base tone to build up the darkest areas, touch up outlines, and enhance any tiny details that may have gotten lost in the base tone. I allow this layer to dry completely (at least a few days) before moving on – if a paper towel rubbed on the surface picks up any pigment, the layers aren't dry enough to take additional oil work without lifting. 

 I start glazing in the color - I start with the blue tones, mixing a transparent glaze of ultramarine, phthalo blue, and walnut oil. I paint it into select areas with a small, soft filbert brush. In places where I'm glazing directly over dense areas of base tone (the hair and beard, for example) this gives me a deep near-black shade; everywhere else, the saturated blue color comes through nicely.

 While the glaze is still wet, I use a tiny round brush to add small highlights and details in slightly blue-tinted white, also thinned with walnut oil.

 Because I don't want my glazes mixing at the edges, I let the blue layer dry before going back in with bright washes of indian yellow for the metals & fabrics.

To keep the color scheme from running too bright and cartoony, I temper the yellows with a bit of alizarin crimson for the shadows, brushed directly into the still-wet glaze. This gives the metalwork a hint of rust or weathering for slightly more natural look.  

 I also work in a few more tiny highlights and details - mostly highlights to add texture to armor and scales - with yellowish-white oils and a very tiny brush.

 At this point, the image is just about finished; however, I decide the blue and yellow areas need to meld a bit better. Choosing blue for my final tone (I could have chosen yellow, but wanted to keep the color scheme distinct from the greenish-yellow King of Spades) I work a very thin glaze into the edges of the yellow and neutral areas (scales, armor, skin, etc) and blend thoroughly with a paper towel.

 The final glaze feels a bit too opaque over the lighter values; fortunately, kneaded erasers can be used to lift out the pigment without disturbing the layers of dry paint beneath (another advantage they have - I'd never dare to scrub at my painting with solvent this late in the game).

Project shoutout: Angelarium
over 8 years ago – Thu, Jul 07, 2016 at 09:42:39 PM

Just two weeks left in the project, and already we're closing in on 70k! Thank you (all 1800+ of you - wow!) for believing in this project enough to put your hard-earned money behind it.

In these final weeks I'll be revealing the last of the artwork for the project, and starting to put things in motion for getting the deck and book printed; in the meantime, I wanted to shoot you guys a link to my friend Peter Mohrbacher's current Kickstarter project, Angelarium.

Peter was working on his Angelarium series long before I started my card illustrations, and seeing his success with a creator-owned, deeply personal art project was one of the major factors that inspired me to take the risk and throw myself into Wicked Kingdom. Without his influence, this card deck might never have been.

Peter is currently self-publishing the second book in his Angelarium series. It's a surreal dive into the world of the fallen angels and his largest collection of work to date. If you haven't seen his paintings before, this is a great introduction to them.

 Check out Angelarium: Book of Watchers here: http://tiny.cc/t2fqcy