Wicked Kingdom - Illustrated Playing Cards by Wylie Beckert

Illustration Spotlight: The Ace of Diamonds
over 8 years ago – Thu, Jul 07, 2016 at 03:03:00 PM

"The oldest of the four kingdoms, the Kingdom of Diamonds represents the intersection of religious tradition and scientific advancement; even within the monastic framework of its culture, knowledge and reason have been permitted to flourish.

Chiseled into the barren peaks and bottomless caverns of the high mountains, its capitol enjoys a geographical remoteness that has long sheltered it from the discord that has been the downfall of other kingdoms. Its lofty position, however, does not exempt its people from their own trials: frailty, sickness, and other ill omens borne by the light-poisoned waters of its rivers."

I wanted each ace to prominently feature the relevant symbol (diamond, heart, etc) while incorporating some of the major elements I'd established for each suit during my work on the face cards. For the Diamonds suit, the most important recurring element has been the glowing crystals and smoke; I also decided to bring back the lantern from the King of Diamonds. 

 I scan my thumbnail and rough in an approximation of my final value structure in Photoshop (mainly using multiply layers), then print the sketch at full size and use a lightbox to transfer the sketch to a sheet of Bristol.

I use red Col-Erase pencil for the initial layout transfer and to flesh out the sketch, before switching to mechanical pencils for the final rendering.

 As I work on the drawing, I intermittently blend the entire surface with a piece of chamois - this softens the harshness of the pencil lines and creates an even midtone, allowing brighter highlights to be picked out with a kneaded eraser.

Rather than working directly over my pencil art, I use a print on tinted pastel paper as a base for the painting. I wet-stretch the paper (tutorial available here) to prevent buckling.

I ink the drawing with a mix of brown and black acrylic ink and a small round brush, then add in a few washes of yellow and purple watercolor to lay the foundations for the final color scheme. 

  Once dry, I go in with white charcoal pencils to add a sense of lighting and dimensionality to the forms; I love this stage because the effect is very sculptural - it adds a great deal of drama and finish for the comparatively small amount of additional rendering I'm actually adding in.

After the white charcoal drawing is finished, I seal it with three coats of diluted matte medium in a small spray bottle, and three more coats brushed on at full strength. This seals the watercolor and white charcoal without washing it away, and creates a barrier to protect the paper from the layers of oil paint to come.

 I begin the oil stage with a layer of reddish purple oil paint, thinned with walnut oil and scrubbed into all but the lightest areas of the piece with a flat brush, then blended with a paper towel into a thin, even layer.

While the paint is still wet, I use kneaded erasers to clean up the edges of the base tone and pull out the highlights. In a lot of ways, what I'm doing at this stage is just reinforcing the value structure that I'd previously built in ink and white charcoal. There's definitely some redundancy to the process, but I've found that each stage adds a bit more depth and variety, resulting in an image with a lot more interest than it would have had if I'd gone for the final painting all at once.

One final pass with the color I mixed for the base tone - I use a small round brush to go over the major outlines and touch up any details that may have gotten lost under the base tone. To keep the overall effect subtle, I blend these stronger outlines and details into the base tone slightly with a clean filbert brush. 

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

 Over the dried base tone, I start to add a little bit more complexity to the color scheme. I'm mainly using a darker, bluer purple tone (thinned with a bit more walnut oil than I used for the base tone) to knock back the diamond symbol; again, kneaded erasers can be used to lift the glaze for highlights and some additional detailing.

I use a contrasting, bright gold tone for the decorative trim and, more sparingly, for the areas of the lantern and crystals where I want to create a glowing effect. 

 Because the white charcoal I've been using for my light tones up until this point doesn't go down completely opaque, it lets a lot of the warm gray of the paper through - so at this point even the lightest values in the piece aren't pure white; opaque white oil paint will naturally fall a few shades lighter, so blending even fairly small touches of it into the yellow glazes goes a long way towards creating that illusion of glow and pumping up the very brightest of the highlights.

Illustration Spotlight: The Queen of Diamonds
over 8 years ago – Tue, Jul 05, 2016 at 08:04:56 PM

"THE QUEEN OF DIAMONDS: a title held by the eldest of the chosen girls, blinded by oleander, who trade the deceptions of their earthly eyes for inviolable vision of smoke and stone. In the temple beneath the mountains, they are taught to read the language of the true-sighted; the histories and philosophies lost to the rest of the four kingdoms are revealed to them in the darkness.

Upon the death of the Queen - often an early one, as the work of a vessel is not without its costs - a new girl assumes the title; by her vows she will be silent until such time as the stone speaks through her in a voice as old as the world - a voice that whispers the fates of men and foretells the rise and fall of kingdoms.

Her counsel is sought by kings, heroes, and other wanderers in the dark."

This is one of my favorite pieces from the series - both visually and thematically. Check out some snapshots & notes from the creation of the painting below!

As usual, I started this piece with an idea map. The first concept that jumped out at me was from the Hope Diamond's legendary origins as the eye of a religious statue; I liked the idea of a diamond as a means of magical sight - it tied in with the mystical properties of crystal, and formed a connection to the glowing alchemical diamonds I'd added to my King of Diamonds painting. I thought that these diamonds, while created through scientific means, might also have a complementary religious significance.

I started to think of the Queen of Diamonds as a priestess - I took heavy inspiration from the Oracle of Delphi (visions triggered by geological vapors was too good of a connection to the King's mining background to pass up); to tie in with the theme of knowledge and learning I'd already established for the suit, I pictured a religious order tasked with preserving the entirety of their kingdom's historical and philosophical knowledge, and predicting the future based on its analysis (aided, in small part, by the peculiar psychoactive properties of the alchemical stone.)

 In keeping with the usual dual-identity theme, I thought the perfect complement to the Queen's role as an all-seeing priestess would be voluntary blindness - a sacrifice that would do away with the deceptions of the outside world, and allow for the cultivation of a metaphysical inner sight.

I used a lightbox to transfer an enlargement of the thumbnail sketch to a sheet of Bristol, and roughed in the details with a red Col-erase pencil before starting the final rendering in pencil.

 Normally I'm a much bigger fan of the pencil art than the finished painting. This time, though, I was hesitant about the piece at the pencil stage; I wasn't sure if the concept (or content, for that matter) would read clearly (there's an awful lot of tangled hair and swirling smoke, even for me); luckily, this was one of the rare instances where the addition of color actually helped clarify things (artist kids: this almost never works! Do not try this at home!)

I work over a print of my drawing (to preserve the original pencil art) and wet-stretch the paper before I start painting. Following the formula I established with the King of Diamonds, I start with a wash of purple watercolor to enliven the gray tone of the paper. For areas where I'll want neutral or warm tones, I use a damp sea sponge to sop up some of the color. Once this initial wash is dry, I bring in some yellow washes - focusing on the light sources (the glowing crystals, the censer) and the decorative trim of the

 I let the watercolor layers dry completely before going back in with a small round brush and a mix of brown and black acrylic ink to redraw the lines of my printed sketch. While I'm using fairly solid outlines for the edges of the forms (the hands, the silhouette of the heads) I try to keep the interior details fairly soft by diluting the ink with water and working in broad areas of fill rather than crisp linework.

Elements that will have a glow to them, like the crystals and smoke, get almost no ink - I'll be defining the shapes of these objects through highlights rather than shadows. I'm finding that this is a good rule to follow for any lighter-colored object; it helps clarify the overall value structure of a painting (light things should be lighter than dark things - sounds simple enough, I know...) and avoids the flat, cartoony look that can happen when everything is rendered in the same range of values.

 White charcoal pencils! There are no bounds to my love for these things. The dark (and, admittedly, a little muddy) underpainting makes a great backdrop for brighter details, and it's surprisingly easy to create lighting effects and the illusion of three-dimensionality.

Because I have a lot going on in the areas where hair and smoke overlap, I add a few additional steps to my usual process at this stage...

I draw in the light tones of the hair first, completely ignoring the smoke (above left), then seal with three spray coats of matte medium. Once dry, I add a wash of yellow watercolor (above right) to knock back the brightness of the hair, creating a more subtle midtone... over which I can draw in the swirls of smoke (below). I'm quite literally adding depth to the painting, and the result is a lot more naturalistic (not to mention easier) than trying to paint this sort of translucent effect in a single pass.  

Another three coats of spray matte medium to seal the white charcoal, plus three more coats brushed on for added protection, prepare the underpainting for the oil stage. 

A mixture of dark, transparent oil paint (in this case, a reddish purple) and walnut oil) deepens the overall tone of the painting - essentially unlocking a whole new slice of the value scale, while allowing all of the painstaking ink and white charcoal work to shine through. 

I dab the base color on all but the lightest areas (precision is not required here, but I try to keep the paint out of the borders as much as possible) and blend with a blue paper towel to create a thin, even layer of color.

I use a kneaded eraser to lift the wet base tone out of the highlights, revealing the lighter underpainting below. For softer transitions - especially in the smoky areas - I blend the edges of the rubbed-out areas with a paper towel. Once I'm finished with the current side of the piece, I repeat the process (applying and blending the base tone, pulling out the highlights) with the other half of the painting, making sure to do a final cleanup pass where the edges of the two halves meet. 

The overall effect after the base tone and rub-out stages is fairly soft; while I think this could work for some pieces, I think playing card art needs to be a little bolder - especially since I know that too-subtle details will get lost when printed on tiny cards. With a small brush, I use the same paint I mixed for the base tone to touch up the major outlines and add emphasis to facial features and other important details. I also add a bit more pigment to solid dark areas (the backgrounds, the insides of the sleeves).

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 transparent oil pigments, thinned with a good amount of walnut oil, to bring a wider range of colors to the (still mostly monochromatic) base painting. Some of these adjustments are fairly subtle (a bluer purple for the backgrounds, and a redder purple for the robes) - but I'm also adding a brighter yellow-orange to the trim on the robes and the cast glow of the crystals, and (sparingly) to the skin.

 I use a tiny round brush to add lighter details and highlights - I use white tinted with a little bit of yellow and thinned with walnut oil.

Since I'm working into the wet glazes, the highlights pick up a little bit of the surrounding colors, and can be further blended into the glazes with a clean brush for a more subtle effect. This is a small, but surprisingly important step - the extra level of highlights does a lot to sharpen the image and push the values that extra little bit. 

 Once dry, I compare the Queen of Diamonds to the King of Diamonds to double-check my color scheme. The Queen needs the same thin glaze of yellow that I used to knock back the purple hue of the King, along with some subtle reds worked into the skin tones...

 The result is a much better match between King and Queen!

Illustration Spotlight: The Jack of Diamonds
over 8 years ago – Mon, Jul 04, 2016 at 08:08:02 PM

"THE JACK OF DIAMONDS: a fanatical priest of the new order, in whose righteous heart the divine fire burns.

Downriver of the mines and forges, in the blackest corners of the kingdom where the radiance of the alchemical fires has yet to reach, his doctrines have kindled a guiding light. His teachings reject the meditative studies of the old order in favor of a slavish devotion to fasting and purification; for only through purification (his writings teach) can the body become a conduit through which the devouring flame may burn without consuming, and irradiate through its brilliance the darkness of a wicked world."

 Looking back on the King and Queen, I found that the developing theme for the Diamonds suit was one of illumination and enlightenment, and a blending of scientific knowledge and mysticism. I wanted to explore a slightly different angle on these themes for the Jack - the dark side of such pursuits and their potential pitfalls (what forces have more dualistic potential than science and religion?)

 I'd established some of the arcane religious traditions of the suit with the Queen; in a lot of ways, her backstory was more interesting to me than that of the King. Following the same line of thought, I thought that the Jack might be a priest of a separate, more dogmatic religious order; one that rejects the methodical study and learning of the Queen's order in favor of a fanatical pursuit of purification.

I imagined this order springing up far from the kindgom's capitol, where the innovation of the King's alchemical fire has yet to reach in practice - but has reached, perhaps, in a luminous chemical runoff to which a new religious order has attributed divine properties.

I wanted one side of the card to represent the priest in control of his newly-acquired divine radiance; on the other side, he is consumed by it.

 I tweak my thumbnail in Photoshop - mostly copy/pasting and rotating elements to keep my composition as balanced as possible, and to ensure that the overall symmetry holds up visually despite the different details on each side.

Once it's adjusted to my liking, I use a lightbox to transfer an enlargement of the thumbnail sketch to a sheet of Bristol...

...then start to build the rough sketch in red Col-Erase pencil. 

With all the important details established, I switch over to graphite (2mm drafting lead and .5mm mechanical pencil are my go-to tools) to perfect the drawing and render out the piece fully.

Rather than working directly over my pencil art, I use a print on tinted pastel paper as a base for the painting. I wet-stretch the paper to prevent buckling.

 Using a small round brush, I ink the drawing with a 4:1 mix of brown and black acrylic ink - keeping things fairly transparent and washy inside the major outlines. It's at this stage that I work out most of the final rendering for important areas like the face and hands- there will be some additional lighting and detailing at the white charcoal stage, but subsequent oil layers will be applied sparingly and quite transparently.

 I start building up my highlights in white charcoal pencils, only to realize that I've forgotten a major step in the process...

In my haste I totally forgot to apply the usual watercolor washes to the ink drawing. I make it almost halfway through the white charcoal drawing before I realize; there's nothing to do but go in and apply the washes on top of the white charcoal (which washes away most of it). I'm able to save some of the work on the face (which doesn't need a ton of saturated color anyways); everything else I get to do again.

 After the white charcoal drawing is finished, I seal it with three coats of diluted matte medium in a small spray bottle, and three more coats brushed on at full strength. This seals the watercolor and white charcoal without washing it away, and creates a barrier to protect the paper from the layers of oil paint to come.

 To deepen the values and start to build the final color scheme, I brush a mix of reddish-purple oil paint and walnut oil into all but the lightest areas of the piece. I use a paper towel to blend the paint and create a thin, semitransparent base tone - still avoiding the light areas, and letting the paint sit a little bit heavier in the darkest areas of the piece. It doesn't matter if a little bit of paint gets into these light areas (I'll be doing some cleanup at the next stage) but I try to keep the edges fairly neat to save myself some work.

 I use a kneaded eraser to lift the base tone out of highlights and to neaten the edges; if I go overboard with this, I'll dab and blend a little bit of extra paint into the area and redo the lifting with a lighter hand.

 With a small round brush and the same purple mixed for the base tone, I go over the lineart (especially the major outlines) and blend some darker tones into important details like the facial features. It's always a bit of a balancing act here - I want the dramatic effect of the stronger, higher-contrast lines that the oil paint adds, without losing the subtlety of the ink drawing beneath. I've found a pretty good middle ground here by using the oil paint to tweak the line weight - I'll start to trace an inked line in oils, then taper off and blend the edges of the brush stroke so it fades seamlessly into the lines of the ink drawing.

 I handle the final glazes in three stages. First, I use a slightly darker/bluer purple than the base tone to knock back the darkest areas of the piece and add some depth and shadows to the edges of the figure.

 Next, I use a red-orange mix, thinned down to almost nothing with walnut oil, to add warmth to the skin tones. I blend the glaze into the surface sparingly with a small brush, making a point of not applying the color uniformly across all the areas of skin - instead, I focus on the borders between light and shadow, and areas like the nose, ears, etc, where you'd naturally see more saturation and warmth in the skin tones. The variation created by letting the underpainting show through in places help create a more naturalistic effect.

 Finally, I add a bright yellow glaze to the trim on the cloak, and around illuminated areas like the hand holding the glowing jar. I temper the yellow at its edges by blending in a tiny bit of purple to dull it down.

  While the glazes are still wet, I paint in small, opaque highlights and details using a slightly yellow-tinted white and a tiny round brush. I keep these highlights sharp on hard surfaces like the jar; for a softer look on the skin and robes, I use a clean filbert brush to blend the edges into the glazes.

Stretch goal unlocked: custom seals!
over 8 years ago – Fri, Jul 01, 2016 at 12:43:40 AM

I know I keep saying it, but the support for this project has been absolutely unbelievable! You guys made my day yet again today by bringing the funding to the $60,000 mark! We're now at 333% (make a wish) of the original funding goal, which means...

SECOND STRETCH GOAL UNLOCKED! Each copy of the deck will now feature a custom-designed seal unique to the Wicked Kingdom deck. If there's any specific imagery you'd like to see on the seals, leave your suggestions in the comments - I'll be cracking open a sketchbook soon to get started on the design. Keep an eye out for work-in-progress snapshots as the seals develop!

Once again, thank you everyone for making this project such a huge success - I can't even describe how awesome it is knowing that there are now over 1600 of you helping to bring this project to life.

Illustration Spotlight: The King of Diamonds
over 8 years ago – Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 04:20:24 PM

"THE KING OF DIAMONDS, seeker of knowledge and bringer of light. Alongside his laboratories and the unimaginable libraries contained within, all other wonders of the four kingdoms pale.

It is the subject of some debate how many decades he has spent shut up in the darkness, bent over scrolls and beakers - but legend generally puts the number between ten and fifteen. The fruit of his labors: a kingdom renowned for its ceaseless industry and unsurpassed wealth, whose heights and depths alike are perpetually illuminated by the harnessed light of alchemical fires."

 This was another card that could have gone a few different ways, since diamonds carry quite a few associations. I liked the idea of focusing on the geological aspect of diamonds - their connection to earth, their formation from carbon in heat and pressure (I secretly wanted to work a dragon into this concept somehow, but couldn't make it fit... and didn't want to double up on the animal companion concept so soon after the King of Clubs.)

I wasn't quite sure how to work these elements into the design visually - this is where some random word associations came into play. Thinking on diamonds, the "diamonds are forever" motto came to mind; this formed a bridge to the idea of immortality - sought by alchemists who, by happy coincidence, would surely have jumped at the idea of synthesizing diamonds from coal. 

The King of Diamonds developed as a miner/alchemist, digging coal for the purpose of alchemical transformation into diamond. I also liked the idea that the final product of this process might be a light-producing crystal - enabling the king to mine more efficiently in the dark for more coal, more diamonds... forever.

I should probably avoid looking at my in-progress pencils - every time I do, I see some lost detail that I wish I'd kept in the final image. In this case, I kind of like the single lump of diamond in the flask... but I've learned not to shy away from making changes during the drawing process - for every little loss like this one, there have probably been five bigger changes that made the final image stronger.  

 Working over a wet-stretched giclee print of my pencil art on toned paper, I lay in an initial watercolor wash (purple in this case), pulling the pigment out of the areas I want to remain neutral with a damp sea sponge.

 Once the wash has dried, I ink the underdrawing with a mix of brown and black acrylic ink and a small round brush. Since a two-tone underpainting worked out well for the King of Clubs, this time around I add some additional washes of yellow to select areas to give the impression of the cast glow of firelight.

As always, this is my favorite stage - the part where my clumsy underpainting starts to take shape, and the life of the original drawing starts to reemerge. This piece, with its dramatic lighting effects, especially benefits from the contrast that white charcoal brings. For the very brightest areas - the lantern, headlamp, and tiny lights - I use a little bit of off-white acrylic paint to push the highlights even further. (Also worth noting: I think that's the best hand I've ever drawn!)

Since both white charcoal and watercolor will lift and dissolve with overpainting, I seal the underpainting with three coats of spray matte medium, plus three coats brushed on at full strength, before moving on. 

 Since I had a fairly busy color scheme in mind (various shades of purple, red, and gold) I wanted to see what would happen if I laid in a base tone that matched the final color scheme I had in mind (up until this point, I'd been using a complementary color for this stage - with some success, but I wanted to mix things up a little). I always try to choose transparent pigments for this stage - in this case, the mix is mostly Magenta and Alizarin (both transparent) with just enough Ultramarine (opaque) to give a slight blue tint.

I dab the base color on all but the lightest areas, then blend with a blue paper towel to create a thin, even layer of color.

There are a few options for lifting the pigment to reveal the underpainting. For soft transitions and midtones, rubbing with a clean paper towel is sometimes enough; for very light areas, bright highlights, and cleanup around the edges, I use kneaded erasers. 

Since this technique only works on wet paint, it's a good idea to keep an eye on how fast your paint is drying - there was some really hot weather while I was painting this piece, and I noticed my oils were getting tacky a lot faster than usual. To compensate, I worked on one side of the card at a time for each stage of the oil painting, to avoid getting stuck with a large expanse of unworkable color.

 With a small brush, I use the same paint I mixed for the base tone to touch up some of the small details that are getting lost under the base tone. On previous cards, I essentially re-inked the drawing at this stage, but I wanted to play with a more subtle effect here, so for this one I keep the touchups focused on the facial features, hands, and a few key outlines. The rest of my heavier tones are blended into the dark areas with soft edges.

 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 feel like I'm headed in too monochromatic of a direction now. To add a little bit of variation and interest to the overall color scheme, I mix up a similar color to my base tone, but with a bit more Ultramarine, and brush it - very lightly - into the darkest areas of the piece.

For the rest of the image, I'm mostly glazing in warmer colors - red-orange to tweak the color of the robes and add some life to the skin tones, and a tiny bit of yellow-orange for the decorative trim and metalwork, and for the planes nearest the light sources.

 While the glazes are still wet, I use a tiny round brush to add small highlights and details in slightly yellow-tinted white thinned with walnut oil. The color scheme develops very quickly with just these few glazes - in the image below you can see the contrast between the final glazes (top) and underpainting (bottom).

And, for even more texture and interest, I bring in my kneaded erasers to pick fine lines and tiny details out of the glazes - this time, what's revealed is the slightly lighter oil base tone. This is one of the reasons I love working with a layered approach - you can get some really interesting effects that would be hard to achieve with direct painting.

  While jumping right in to the final color scheme had its advantages (somewhat faster, a lot less nerve-wracking) I felt like the end result was a little too uniformly purple. To neutralize some of the purple tones, I work one last very thin glaze of pure yellow over the surface of the dry painting - leaving just the backgrounds and a few areas of deep purple untouched.

The end result is unified without seeming monotonous; the yellow glaze also intensifies the fire-lit look in the lighter areas.