Wicked Kingdom - Illustrated Playing Cards by Wylie Beckert

Illustration Spotlight: The Queen of Hearts (with process videos!)
over 8 years ago – Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 12:20:34 PM

Another dark chapter in the Wicked Kingdom story... and a few in-depth painting process videos! Check out the drawing, inking, and oil painting stages of the Queen of Hearts below...

[ Before Wicked Kingdom was on Kickstarter, it was on Patreon - I owe a debt of gratitude to supporters of the Wicked Kingdom on Patreon, many of whom have been with the project since the very beginning. Without them, these process videos and tutorials wouldn't exist. THANK YOU! ]

 Starting in on the next card in the series, I had some pretty solid foundations already built with the King of Hearts. In that earlier illustration, I'd established both a conceptual angle and a visual style for the suit that I was happy with. I also had the seed of an idea for the queen in the king's backstory - she's his mother, not his wife (the King of Hearts' conquests do not, as a general rule, survive lengthy courtships) and as such, his own peculiar ways can be traced back to her influence.

 In my idea map for the king, there were a few directions that had gone unexplored, but nonetheless fit well with the Hearts suit and seemed like good candidates for the queen: the first was romantic trappings (valentines, flowers, gifts) and the second was Elizabeth Bathory (the Hungarian countess rumored to bathe in the blood of virgins to preserve her youth). The Queen of Hearts represents two enslaving aspects of beauty: the devotion it elicits in others, and the dedication required to maintain it.

 I use a lightbox to transfer the overall layout from an enlarged printout of my thumbnail to a sheet of Bristol paper, then start building the rough sketch in red Col-Erase pencil.

 With the rough sketch nailed down in Col-Erase, I switch to mechanical pencils for the final drawing. To preserve the energy of the drawing, I work directly over the rough sketch - building up values, refining details, and making small adjustments as needed.

 I have a giclee print made of my pencil drawing on tinted pastel paper; since I'll be using water media, I wet-stretch my paper to prevent buckling.

I start the underpainting with a wash of pink watercolor, then ink the drawing using a small round brush and a mix of brown and black acrylic ink.

 Once dry, white charcoal pencil is used to sculpt the forms and add highlights, textures, and fine details. I seal all of this with a few coats of matte medium, diluted and sprayed on with a tiny spray bottle, to avoid washing away the white charcoal.

 I've found that not a lot of the underpainting's color comes through in the final piece, but for areas that will need a lot of saturation (the heart, for example) I add one last layer of red watercolor before spray sealing again, and brushing on a few protective coats of matte medium to protect the paper from the oil paint I'll be using next.

 To deepen the overall values and build some contrast, I use a dark greenish-teal mix - thinned with walnut oil - for the oil base tone. Since I'll be spreading this layer very thinly, I only apply it directly to the darkest areas, then blend it around with a blue shop towel - letting the paint spread thinly into the midtones, but trying to keep it off of the lightest areas (faces, background) as much as possible. You can add a certain amount of depth to a painting right off the bat by controlling the thickness of the base layer across the different values.

 The next step is to start pulling paint out of the base tone to push that illusion of depth even further. You can use a brush or paper towel dipped in solvent to do this, but I've been using kneaded erasers for a similar effect - they're less messy, and easier to rework, since I can use a soft brush or paper towel to soften edges or blend a little bit of extra paint into the "erased" areas if I overdo it (which solvent doesn't really allow for).

 With the lighter tones established, I move on to the darker tones. With the same paint I mixed for the base tone, I use a small round brush to build up the darkest values and (sparingly) touch up the lineart to restore some of the contrast that's been lost under the base tone. It's a bit of a balancing act - adding enough oil work to add emphasis, without going overboard and flattening out the image. I try to leave the softer, underlying ink work visible within forms, and use the darker oils for bold edges and large areas of fill.

Once the base tone is completely dry, saturated glazes finish out the color scheme. While I try to use transparent pigments at all stages of the oil painting, it's especially important for this step (if you're not sure where to start on color selection, a lot of brands of oil paint are helpful enough to label each tube as transparent, opaque, etc.) In this case I'm using Alizarin Crimson, dulled with a little bit of brown and mixed with enough walnut oil that it isn't obscuring the layers beneath - just tweaking their hue.  

 While the glaze is still wet, I use a tiny round brush to add small highlights and details in slightly pink-tinted white, thinned with walnut oil. Normally I do a lot more of this highlighting on a piece, but this time around I found there wasn't too much to add (maybe I'm getting better at controlling values earlier on in the process?). The glistening heart is probably the most obvious example of these final touches. 

To knock back the last lingering remnants of the teal base tone, I add one final (very thin) reddish-pink glaze to the entire image.

Normally, this is where I'd call the painting finished, but this time around I felt like something was missing; squinting at the image, I realized there wasn't quite enough separation in values between the faces and the darker background corners. I didn't want to lighten the overall skin tone (and doing so this late in the game would probably be impossible anyways) so, I came up with an alternate solution: a layer of geisha-inspired face paint. I liked that this not only solved my contrast problem, it also fit perfectly with the narrative I'd been developing for the character. I took a snapshot of the painting and tried out a digital mockup of the changes before risking it on the actual painting.

It always feels like a gamble making changes at the late stages of a painting, but in this case I'm glad I went for it.

Illustration Spotlight: The King of Hearts
over 8 years ago – Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 07:58:30 PM

Day 10, and we're already approaching 250% of the original funding goal! The campaign keeps getting bigger & better, and I'm looking forward to rolling out some improvements and big news in the coming week... but for now here's the next card in the series: the King of Hearts!

I'd originally thought I might create a surgeon or anatomist character for the King of Hearts; once I started to jot down some notes, though, this theme felt like a bit of a dead end.

 Following the idea of dismemberment, though, put me on the track towards Bluebeard (the fairytale involving locked rooms and murdered wives). The story offered a bridge between two separate “heart” themes - love (the symbolic heart) and gore (the anatomical heart) - and gave me a rough framework for the King of Hearts card: romance one side; blood, guts, and human sacrifice on the other.

 I scan and enlarge my thumbnail to its final size, print it out, and use a lightbox to transfer the rough layout to a sheet of Bristol paper using a brown Col-Erase pencil.The final pencil drawing is worked directly on top of this rough sketch in mechanical pencils.

 Rather than working directly on top of my pencil art, I have a giclee print made of the drawing on a sheet of tinted pastel paper. The initial watercolor wash is pink, dulled with a little bit green and pulled out of the lightest areas with a damp sea sponge.

I did some test swatches (upper right) to audition color mixes; subsequent layers of oil paint did a pretty good job of blotting out this initial tint, but it's generally a useful technique for planning a color scheme – especially since painting on tinted paper can sometimes yield unexpected results. Since the printed sketch starts to get lost under the watercolors, I use tiny brushes and acrylic ink to bring some emphasis back to the drawing.

Once the ink is dry, I go in with white charcoal pencil to build up the lightest areas and add detail. In the past, I've experimented with using white acrylic paint for this stage - but since I've always been more comfortable with drawing than painting, using traditional drawing tools to create my “underpainting” is a lot easier for me, and seems to let my style come through more naturally.

Since both white charcoal and watercolor will lift and dissolve with overpainting, I seal the underpainting with three coats of spray matte medium, and another three coats brushed on to protect the paper from oil paint at the next stage.

I mix a deep greenish-teal oil paint with enough walnut oil to allow it to spread easily. Using a small flat brush, I scrub the mixture into only the darkest areas of the sealed underpainting, then rub with a blue paper towel to blot up excess paint and create a thin, even layer that extends into the midtone areas.

I try to keep the light border and background areas completely free from paint. Using a small filbert brush dipped in solvent, I scrub the oil paint out of the lighter areas. For the very brightest highlights, I use a Q-tip, which seems to pick up more pigment than a brush; I dab up excess solvent with a paper towel, to avoid compromising the matte medium underneath.

 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.

It's okay to panic a little at this stage (did I choose too weird of a color? Is this guy going to look like a Smurf?) - subsequent layers of oil glazes can do quite a bit to bringing the hue back around to where you need it. BUT, definitely err on the side of using a light hand – looking back, I think I could have left more of my subtle inked lines visible. 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 choose transparent oil colors – in this case Permanent Alizarin Crimson and Transparent Brown Oxide – and mix with walnut oil for my glazes. I focus on the areas where I want the most saturated red tones (the cloak, heart, and beard) but, because I'm hoping to gradually knock back the strong teal tint left over from the last stage, I also blend my red glaze, very lightly, into the skin tone. While the glaze is still wet, I use a tiny round brush to add small highlights and details in slightly pink-tinted white, thinned with walnut oil.

Since I've been pushing the colors in several different directions throughout the painting process, the end result isn't as unified as I'd like – I feel that the teal and white are both coming through a little strong. The solution a subtle, red-toned glaze applied sparingly to the entire image, with the exception of the border and the very lightest areas of the piece. (A scrap of plexiglass is handy for previewing the effect before committing to a color for the glaze). A few very faint white highlights are painted directly into the wet glaze as needed, and the image is finished!

Illustration Spotlight: The Ace of Spades (with process video!)
over 8 years ago – Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 08:57:52 PM

In addition to the usual words & pictures, I also filmed the creation of the Ace of Spades - check out the complete (if highly condensed) drawing and painting process for the card art below.

In other news: FIRST STRETCH GOAL UNLOCKED! Every copy of the deck will now be printed on casino-quality Bee stock. Thanks for helping get this project to the $40K mark! If you're as excited about this milestone as I am, consider taking a few seconds to share the Wicked Kingdom project on Facebook and/or yell about it as loud as you can from an upstairs window.

 The Ace of Spades concept was one of the first that sprang to mind when I was brainstorming the aces. I wanted to create a skull sprouting leaves to become the core of a cabbage - an inspiration drawn from the backstory for the King of Spades: "...the cabbages that grow in unusual abundance from those dark plots of earth sometimes have the faces of men..."

 I trace my thumbnail on Bristol, using a red Col-Erase pencil and a lightbox. With the rough layout transferred, I start fleshing out the image - still working in Col-Erase, which gives me a bit more flexibility to rework and erase than graphite. Because I want the ace to recall aspects of the entire Spades suit, I add some of the nightshade flowers from the Queen, and the twigs and grasses from the Jack.

 With the rough sketch finished, it's finally time to begin the pencil drawing. I use mechanical pencils, and work directly on top of the Col-Erase sketch. While some of the red lines will show through in the final drawing, I actually don't mind the effect; they add some depth to the image, and hint at the underlying structure and gesture of the drawing.

 I scan my finished drawing and 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 to a sheet of Gatorfoam using gummed paper tape, then allow it to dry thoroughly before inking the drawing using a mix of brown and black acrylic ink. I'm aiming for a mix of subtle, washy areas and crisp lineart.

  Some of the work at this stage will eventually end up buried under layers of white charcoal and oil paint, but enough of it will end up showing through that I still try to nail down the fine details and value structure I established in the pencil drawing.

 I finish with an all-over wash of green watercolor to counteract the warm gray of the paper before moving on to the white charcoal stage.

 For the final stage of the underpainting (underdrawing?) I switch to white charcoal pencils to build a sense of lighting and dimensionality, and pick out the details that were too fine or pale for me to achieve in ink. For how little white charcoal I'm actually applying at this stage, it lends a great deal of finish to the piece.

 This is the point where the image starts to come to life; due to the nature of the white charcoal, small divergences from the original pencil drawing happen almost on their own and add complexity to the image (a few barely-intentional pencil strokes, for example, formed the beginning of the leafy textures in the skull). I try to build on these variations to stregthen the image whenever I can.

To prevent smudging, I apply three coats of diluted matte medium with a spray bottle. Three more coats brushed on at full strength protect the paper from subsequent layers of oil paint. 

 I mix a reddish-purple hue in oils, and thin it to an easily-workable consistency with walnut oil. Using a large flat brush, I dab the mixture into all but the lightest areas of the piece and blend with a paper towel for a thin, even layer.

I use kneaded erasers (a handy tool at every stage of the process) to clean up the edges of the piece and pick the wet oil paint out of the highlights.

With a small round brush, I fill in the deepest values and deepen the major outlines and key details like the crow feathers and the eye sockets of the skull. The end result is a mostly-monochromatic underpainting; the ink and white charcoal layers shine through in the lightest areas, and fade back where the oil paint is applied thickly. I let this layer dry completely before going any further.

The main glaze is a bright yellow-green, mixed with walnut oil until it's very thin and transparent. Applying this glaze over the natural variations of the underpainting and the purple tone of the oil base tone yields an extremely clear, saturated color over the lighter areas, and a more subtle, deadened shade over the darks. 

 My final glaze is a deep bluish-purple, applied sparingly and blended well. I use kneaded erasers again to pick up the wet paint, revealing the warmer hue of the underpainting below to simulate the slightly iridescent look of crow feathers.

 While the glazes are still wet, I paint in opaque white highlights and details, blending most of the marks with a clean brush so they aren't too garish. I leave just a few important highlights sharp-edged so they'll really stand out.

 Some very soft, diffuse highlights blended into the blue glaze of the crow's feathers, and the painting is done!

Illustration Spotlight: The Jack of Spades
over 8 years ago – Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 06:50:37 PM

It's been a big first week - we've reached 200% of our initial funding goal, and are well on our way to the first stretch goal (the Bee stock upgrade!) Thanks so much to everyone who's backed & shared the project so far - I can't wait to see how far we can go with this...

In the meantime, here are some snapshots and musings from the creation of the Jack of Spades!

The further along I get in this project, the less I have to pull my ideas out of a vacuum. I already had a storyline begun for the Spades suit from my work on the King and Queen; this limited my options for the Jack in certain ways (too late to completely change direction now!) but also gave me some potential jumping-off points.

I decided to focus on the existing connection between the King and Queen - namely, their animosity (she's been poisoning him for some time now, after all - what did he do to make her so mad?). I felt like there must have been some horrible episode that triggered the downfall of their kingdom; the death of their son - perhaps the sole surviving heir - seemed like just the thing, and it gave me the seed of a concept for the Jack: a sort of before-and-after that would tell a little bit about his life and a lot about his death. 

In choosing the imagery, I returned to my original idea map for the King of Spades process; I'd already touched on the ideas of life vs. death and planting vs. harvesting. The idea of Jack as a laborer with a scythe appealed to me because it would create an immediate connection to the traditional Grim Reaper; displaying Jack's skeleton in a manner reminiscent of a scarecrow fit well with the agricultural theme, and inspired more questions for the storyline: how did he die? What vengeful message does the display of his remains represent? 

 I use a red Col-Erase pencil to rough in the major elements of the image. I start very loosely, rather than trying to duplicate each and every line of the thumbnail. 

 Working directly over my rough sketch, I switch to graphite for the final rendering. While this does give me a slightly "messy" final drawing (some errors and corrections in Col-Erase will still be visible under the pencil lines), it's still a much cleaner end result than if I'd been working and re-working in graphite. I've found it's a good way to preserve the energy of the rough sketch, too.

A significant proportion of my drawing time is spent on faces - after all, this is where a viewer will look first and longest in a painting. It almost always takes some tweaking to get things just right. I never move on to the secondary elements until I'm 100% happy with the face. This can result in some long and frustrating work hours, but it's almost always worth the extra effort. My initial attempt at the face (above left) was definitely lacking; the reworked version (above right) does a much better job of conveying the personality of the character.

I scan my finished pencil drawing, and use the Curves and Levels adjustments (along with the Hue/Saturation palette to disappear my Col-Erase lines) for a cleaner drawing. I have a giclee print made of my pencil art (at about 75% opacity) on a sheet of tinted Canson pastel paper.

Since the paper I'm working on can't stand up to water media on its own, I wet-stretch the print before beginning to paint. I'm using the same color palette I used for the King of Spades, so I start the underpainting with a thin wash of bright yellow-green to add a base color to the gray paper I'm working with. In areas that I want to keep neutral, like the skin, I use a damp sea sponge to dab up the pigment. Once the initial wash is dry, I ink the drawing with a mix of umber and black acrylic ink. 

I use thin washes, rather than linework, on delicate areas like the face - I'll be defining the sharper details here in white charcoal for a more naturalistic, less cartoony look.

 Once the inking is finished and dry, I start to bring out the highlights and build the illusion of lighting using white charcoal pencil.

 I like to pack in a lot of fine detail at this stage; subsequent layers of oil paint will tone down any overenthusiastic highlighting, and I like the texture that some extra linework at this stage will add to the finished piece.

I add a few extra touches of color - mostly to add warmth to the skin tones (I like to keep the colors in the skin subtle, which is easier to accomplish now in watercolor than later in oils) and to pump up the saturation of the robes. Once I'm happy with the results, I spray on three more coats of diluted matte medium, then brush on three additional coats at full strength. I seal the finished underpainting with matte medium, diluted by half with water and sprayed on with a small spray bottle. This prevents the white charcoal from smearing; later on, I'll add a few coats brushed on at full strength to prepare the surface for oils.

 Once the matte medium has had a chance to set (I usually give it at least a few extra hours from touch-dry, preferably overnight), I put down a base layer of oil paint in a dark, complementary hue, thinned with walnut oil. I apply this mix to all but the lightest areas of the piece, and use a paper towel to blend for a thin, even layer of tone.

While the base layer is still wet, I use a kneaded eraser to pull the paint out of the light areas and highlights. I tend to tear my erasers into a lot of small pieces so I can switch the used ones out for clean pieces regularly - they get dirty pretty quickly and won't grab the paint as cleanly.

 With a small round brush, I touch up some of the line art and intensify some of the larger areas of dark values. Areas that need some subtlety - skin, fabric folds, and other minor details - I leave untouched; the blended oil base over the softer inked line art is all they really need.

I let the base layers dry completely before starting in on the next round of glazes; how long this takes depends on the pigments I'm using, the ambient temperature and humidity, and how many small animals one has sacrificed to the art gods recently. Normally I allow about 3-4 days for this stage; for some reason it took closer to 10 this time (digital art certainly has its advantages). Once it's finally dry enough to paint over, I use a walnut oil-thinned mix of bright green to glaze in the final, full-saturation colors of the clothing. Thinning it even further - and skewing the mix slightly more yellow - gives me a softer tone to blend into details like the bundle of wheat.

I use a tiny brush to add some opaque white highlights, blending the edges into the wet glaze for a more subtle look.A few touches of extremely thinned Alizarin Crimson warm up the skin tones around the facial features...

...And some dark blue-violet glazes applied selectively help create the slightly iridescent black of the crow feathers.

Illustration Spotlight: The Queen of Spades
over 8 years ago – Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 05:15:58 PM

While I wanted the characters in each suit be thematically entwined, I didn't want too much overlap in the concepts - with each card illustration, I'm hoping to introduce more depth to the larger story rather than just recycling content from one character to another. The King of Spades was a gardener; For the queen, I decided to focus on the medicinal uses of plants. This direction appealed to me because of its fairly straightforward good/evil potential - there's a harmful plant for every beneficial one, and plenty that straddle both extremes. The result: an herbalist and medicine woman on one face, and a poisoner on the other.

Sometimes, hammering an idea out visually can offer new insights. My first thumbnail, above, featured almost perfectly-matched poses, which seemed a bit dull...

While mocking up how the two Spades illustrations would look as a set (I wanted to be sure the value structure and poses of each card roughly mirrored the other) I realized that by turning the head of the "dark" queen, she was suddenly directing a surreptitious, plotting look over her shoulder at the oblivious king. This fit perfectly with the existing narrative, and added something new to it; I already had a king who had abandoned the rule of his kingdom in his madness, but now I had the source of his affliction: his wife, the poisoner.

 I use Col-Erase pencil (usually a brown or red shade - in this case, Terra Cotta) to loosely rough in the placement of the elements from my thumbnail, then start to build up the gesture and structure of my characters - relying about 50% on my reference photos, 50% on imagination and prior experience. 

At this stage, I'm not really worrying about lighting or rendering - I'm just trying to put down an armature to hang the final pencil drawing on. Working in Col-Erase is great for this - it doesn't erase completely, and the paper will still "scar" with repeated reworking as it does with normal pencils, but it does make corrections less apparent in the finished piece than if I were to sketch in graphite from the very beginning (and in a pinch, the colored lines can be edited out in Photoshop using the Hue/Saturation adjustment).

From here, it's just a matter of refining the rough shapes and working out the details. I try to do as much of the "figuring out" as possible in the Col-Erase stage so I won't have to do any serious erasing/reworking once I get to graphite.

With most of the drawing nailed down in Col-Erase, the final rendering goes pretty quickly. I start the final rendering by laying down a midtone to define the pattern of light and shadow (referring again to my reference photos), then carving out details, outlines, and highlights with mechanical pencils and a kneaded eraser. If things start to look overworked, blending with a chamois evens out the lights and darks and gives me a fresh layer of midtone to work with.

I start with the most important elements - usually faces and hands - and work in small sections, bringing each are to a more or less finished state before moving on to the next area - this approach works well for my playing card art (highly detailled, with uniform rendering throughout), and dividing the drawing up into manageable chunks helps keep me focused.

I scan my finished pencil drawing, and use the Curves and Levels adjustments to get a clean image that I can use as a base for both digital and traditional paintings. For this painting, I'm going traditional - so I have a giclee print made of my pencil art (at about 75% opacity) on a sheet of tinted Canson pastel paper.

Since the paper I'm working on can't stand up to water media on its own, I wet-stretch the print before beginning to paint. I'm using the same color palette I used for the King of Spades, so I start the underpainting with a thin wash of bright yellow-green to add a base color to the gray paper I'm working with. In areas that I want to keep neutral, like the skin, I use a damp sea sponge to dab up the pigment.

Once the initial wash is dry, I ink the drawing with a mix of umber and black acrylic ink. I keep the inked lines to a minimum on delicate areas like the face - I'll be defining these areas with white charcoal rather than ink for a more naturalistic, less cartoony look.

On top of my dry ink/watercolor painting, I start to build up light values and highlights. I keep the highlighting a bit more subtle in shadowed areas, but I don't omit it entirely - I'll be applying plenty of darker layers at the oil stage which will help keep the values in check. A bit of white charcoal work in the darker areas will show through as pattern and texture, and will add interest to the piece.

I seal the finished white charcoal drawing with three layers of matte medium (sprayed on with a small spray bottle) and, switching back to watercolors, add in washes of bright greens, yellows, and reds. This is primarily to test drive the color choices I'll be using later on (watercolor is a lot easier to reverse than oil paint) - but some of it will show through subsequent layers - especially in delicate areas like the face - so I take the opportunity to start building up lifelike skin tones, with warmer washes in the shadows and around the nose and eyes.

A few more spray coats of matte medium set the watercolor layers; I brush on a few additional coats to protect the paper from the oil paint.

Once the matte medium has cured, I dab a dark, contrasting base tone (oil paint - in this case reddish-purple - mixed with walnut oil) over all but the lightest areas of the piece, and blend it in with a blue shop towel. Using a kneaded eraser, I pull the wet paint out of the light areas and highlights.

Using a small brush and the same color I mixed for the base tone, I build up the deepest values and emphasize some of the line art. It's easy to get carried away at this stage and essentially re-paint the entire ink drawing, but letting some of the softer ink work show through untouched gives the image more depth - I try to stick to overpainting just the major outlines and very darkest sections of the piece.

I let the base layers dry completely before starting in on the next round of glazes. I use a bright green mix, thinned with walnut oil, for the robes and foliage, along with touches of pure yellow for the centers of the nightshade flowers and decorative trim. Painting highlights into the still-wet glaze with a tiny brush lets the opaque white paint blend with the transparent colors; the result is a nice glowing effect that would be harder to achieve over dried paint.

For the skin tones, I apply a very thin glaze of Alizarin Crimson to the areas directly around the mouth, nose, eyes, and fingers, then gently blend it into the rest of the skin. I let the existing purple and green tones show through here and there to keep the overall effect soft and natural.

Once these glazes are dry, I go in with one final glaze to unify the color scheme and tone down the intensity of the purple undertones. I mix the thinnest yellow glaze imaginable - really just a dab of paint in a small puddle of walnut oil - and apply with a large, soft brush to all but the very lightest areas. I also avoid the nightshade flowers and garlic bulbs - I like the contrast their purple tones bring to the piece.