PlayingCardForum.com - A Discourse For Playing Cards
Off Topic Chat => The Conversation Parlor => Topic started by: Great Lakes Playing Card Co. on April 04, 2017, 11:26:51 PM
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I'm interested to learn if there is any crossover between artists/designers etc. that are in the "Comic Con world" that also "dabble" in playing card design. I'm new/back into card collecting and I feel the surge of new/current fantasy themes etc. along with the popularity of Kickstarter decks might mean that there are artists that do crossover.
Personally, I've never been to a "Comic Con" style event/weekend but I've seen where it appears that lots of artists are there. What I would be interested in is going - if I knew there would be at least a few that have designed decks. I'm sure there are others on here with more "insider knowledge" of this area.
Thanks.
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I'm interested to learn if there is any crossover between artists/designers etc. that are in the "Comic Con world" that also "dabble" in playing card design. I'm new/back into card collecting and I feel the surge of new/current fantasy themes etc. along with the popularity of Kickstarter decks might mean that there are artists that do crossover.
Personally, I've never been to a "Comic Con" style event/weekend but I've seen where it appears that lots of artists are there. What I would be interested in is going - if I knew there would be at least a few that have designed decks. I'm sure there are others on here with more "insider knowledge" of this area.
Thanks.
Playing cards and comic cons don't have a lot of overlap. I went to New York Comic Con in October and discovered exactly one booth selling custom playing cards - Albino Dragon (I know the owner, was glad to see him though it took me a moment to recognize him)!
Artists might get the itch to do a playing card deck, but there's just so many ways that an artist can express their creative desire that even in the artists' alley, you're less likely to run into many of them offering their work on a pack of cards.
HOWEVER... you might actually find, if you had the scratch to start a company for developing playing cards, a designer willing to work for hire and create a deck for you! Very, VERY few artists will design a deck on spec - you'd have to pay them up front for their work. If you were extremely lucky, you might find an artist willing to take a lower cash payment in exchange for product and/or a percentage of sales, but you're very unlikely to find one willing to work for back-end cash/post-crowdfunding payouts alone. The odds they'll take anything but cash up front drop if you have utterly no track record at producing decks - but they'll always work for cash commission, so if you can pay them up front, you can take their work and go to town getting it printed using the crowdfunding model to raise funds for the work - assuming that you have work that people are jazzed about owning, of course.
Outside of the Internet or an art gallery/showing, you're not likely to find more artists gathered in a single place to do business than at a comic-con. You won't get a complete deck in one weekend or even a week unless you're looking at something minimally custom - standard pips, standard faces except for the courts, a back and tuck box that's not too complex, etc. But in the age of the Internet, that's not a big deal - you pay part up front, part on completion of the commission. It wouldn't take a king's ransom to do it, but it would take more than your typical wage slave has lying around as disposable income!
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Great insight Don. Thanks.