Due to life being its crazy self I had withdrawal from my History of Visual Communications class before completing it. This gave me the wonderful opportunity to do the first Project over agian; The Playing Card. Based on my birth date I was assigned the Jack of Hearts as my card.
The inspiration for my card came from pondering on the Jack of Hearts itself. This card is used to represent young love and, for me, brings to mind infatuation. This triggered my thoughts to turn to movies, Hollywood, fame in general, and how we as society gravitate towards certain people. How we “love” actors and characters we have never met.
This caused me to think of one of my friends who “loves” Jack Sparrow, an obsession she shares with countless others. I let my mind play with the idea of using a portrait of Jack Sparrow framed with an art deco boarder, which I felt would contract the rough crudeness brought to mind by “the pirate’s life”.
Due to my recent leave of absence I decided to go with a digital painting as a way to warm back up to Photoshop. I have a fondness for charcoal and pencil sketches and the use of shading and value to build shape and depth which is why I settled on a monochromatic color choice for the card fronts; red and black. I also felt that the chalky, dusty feel of my brush choice would work well, bringing to mind treasure maps and faded paper.
I used a sandy gold for the card back to keep the color separate and distinguishable from the card fronts. I used a dark bluish color for the background of the card back to contrast the gold and add another level of difference from the card fronts, which use white as their background color.
I used a font generator to generate examples of the letters J, Q, K, and A in the Pirates of the Caribbean typeface. I used these examples to help guide me in creating my own letters in my digital painting. I felt using the font associated with the movie would keep the overall image consistent with what a viewer would expect to see.
The coin design on the back of the card is the coin from the first movie, which starts the adventure for the whole series. I felt it fit with the overall theme I was creating and worked with the yellowish color I was hoping to use for the back of the card.
I utilized Photoshop and my Wacom tablet to complete this project, leveraging the program and device’s paint-like abilities. Through the constructive use of layers, brush styles, opacity, and guidelines I was able to create my final images for this assignment.
