SILK SCREENED PLAYING CARDS

This was the final project I designed for my Intro. to Silkscreening course. I designed and silk screened 3 full decks, all four suits, three color, and jokers. I was inspired by Fraktur Mon Amor, an amazing book I stumbled upon in one of my favorite San Francisco bookstores. I decided to use the same approach as the book and created my own designs and patterns using a blackletter typeface. I used the typeface for the numbers, A,K,Q,J, as well as any graphical pattern seen both on the box and the cards. I designed the symbols for each suit myself. Here is a small documentation of the process.


The face of the cards were 2 color. After I completed printing both colors for all the suits for each deck I planned to make, plus about another full deck extra for the mess ups, I cut them each out by hand so that I could print the backs.


After they were all cut, I printed the backs, which were 1 color. At this point I had discarded all the most tragically imperfect cards to make sure that my final 3 decks were made of the best prints, however some are slightly imperfect. I printed 156 cards that day.

After this process I rounded all the corners of the cards with a punch, and proceeded to add the last decorational and final touches by hand. Here are the final cards with a special box I made for them to live inside.