Hello folks,
My name is Zaid. I'm new to the world of cards. I'm an artist and photographer specializing in body art and creative photography. I've been doing photography for 16 years, over the last 10 years I've focused on bodypainting and body art, but since 2007, I have narrowed my art to a technique I call "lightpainting", which is art created by projecting images onto live models and photographing the result. You can see high-res samples of that art here:
images.surrealscapes.net/Artwork/Lumens and if you want to learn more about the technique you can check out some video here:
vimeo.com/channels/surrealscapesOne day three months ago, on a whim, I put together a deck of cards featuring my artwork, knowing nothing about cards and what makes a good deck. You can see that deck here:
www.fineartplayingcards.com. I didn't make any attempt to customize the images for the cards, I just slapped a different art piece on each card face, added generic indices and pips, and that was that. The tuckbox ain't nothin' special neither. I used a small printer in Florida and printed 100 decks and put them up for sale on Amazon, just to see what they would do. They're actually doing pretty well so far, and the interesting thing is that they're being purchased mostly by women, i.e. 70% of the buyers so far have been women. I imagine these buyers to just be people who like the artwork and not particularly card enthusiasts, but I really have no way of knowing.
Originally I was intending the cards to just be a promotional device for my artwork, to increase exposure of my art and thus generate more fine art print sales. But over the past few months I've been checking out all the fantastic custom decks that are out there, I've really started to get into card decks as art pieces in and of themselves and now I'm looking into doing a custom deck of my own utilizing my lightpainting technique. What I would do would be a series of photographs of models whereby the projected images are card-themed somehow.
It would definitely be an expensive and long undertaking as I would first need to design and create all the images to be projected, at least 56. And then I would need to photograph the models to end up with 56 distinct final images for the cards. I use professional models for my artwork and they don't come cheap, at least the good ones don't.
I would probably hire 15-20 models and intend to get several card images from each shoot. Each photoshoot takes 3-4 hours, so we're talking 80 hours of shooting, not to mention the dozens if not hundreds of hours designing the projection images before I could even get to the shoots. And then of course there's all the time spent actually designing and laying out the deck itself and the tuckbox. I would get the cards printed with USPCC and they have specific content restrictions, i.e. no juicy naked bits can be showing, so I'll either have to be careful with my shoots and arrange the models in a way that hides their girl parts, or post-edit the images to censor all the racy parts out in some creative and looks-like-its-meant-to-be-there way.
So the question is this: is this something of interest to you, the experts in the world of cards?
Because a deck like this would have a picture of an actual person on each card face, it seems like it would really only appeal to card game players, i.e. people who just like looking at pretty pictures on their card faces. not magicians or cardists. I wonder if that might not be a big enough audience to justify the undertaking. As I'm writing this, I'm thinking of ways to incorporate the fact that there's a real person in the picture, but emphasize the pips on the card face, so that at first glance it looks like a regular card with just creatively-arranged pips, but when you look closer, you see a real person. It could actually be pretty cool if it works and probably the first of its kind to be done that way. Sure there are bodypainting card decks out there, but again, those are just decks with a pretty picture on each card and no attempt made to customize those images for a card deck.
Then there's the money side of it. The pro models I use charge upwards of $100 per hour, so each photoshoot could be $400 in model fees. Let's say I manage to find less expensive models and got the rate down to $50/hr. Multiply that by 20 shoots and you're at $4000 in just model fees. And this isn't something that I could pre-fund with Kickstarter because I wouldn't want to take the risk that I couldn't pull it off. I would spend my own money upfront to generate all the photographs and artwork and then go to Kickstarter once the deck is actually ready to go to production. But I would definitely need to be confident that such a deck would be popular enough to generate enough funding via KS to cover my costs, and then hopefully have enough of a retail market afterwards to actually turn a profit. I'd love to do this deck just for the sake of the art, but I don't can't afford to risk that kind of money on just an art piece, it would need to make business sense for me to take the risk.
What do you think? Would you go for a deck like this with the same fervor as other recent popular decks have received?
Zaid
Show Posts