King's Keys Art
This is the art of the King's Keys Deck.
The challenge was to create four different pips that would all be displayed in four different colors. Since some players would be color blind and some need glasses I wanted to make every symbol easy to distinguish for all types of players.
The back of each card features a landscape of the symbols from all four Kingdoms: Sun, Mountain, Forest and Ocean.
In some games cards from some Kingdoms are more valuable than others. The landscape is a guide to show the Kingdoms in order of highest to lowest.
On the top is the Sun (Yellow) Kingdom which is the highest Kingdom, followed by Mountain (Red), Forest (Green) and finally Ocean (Blue) is the lowest Kingdom.
In other games a Kingdom is chosen at random to be the most valuable. For this you can use the Kingdom Cards with the banners.
The four Kingdom Cards show the colors and symbols of the four Kingdoms.
If you don't see colors well, the symbols are there to help you tell them apart.
The yellow cards all use black ink for Suns and details, the red cards have white mountains and details, the green cards have black Forest trees and the blue cards have white Ocean waves.
In some games the Kingdom cards are important and in others they are not used at all.
The pips began as simple shapes: Circles, Squares, Triangles and Stars. Later I was inspired by items that you find in role playing adventure games: Keys, Axes, Shields and Coins. I'd like to imagine characters in a D&D adventure playing games with this deck in a tavern between campaigns.
Like a standard deck, these pips were designed to be simple, bold, and easy to distinguish. The shapes are original except for the coins which are a geometric shape of constant width.
Since I would never need more than four on one card, I had the luxury of making the pips much bigger than normal cards.
I also took some liberties on the arrangement of the pips to help keep them big.
I've always loved Jokers in decks and am glad I could incorporate Jokers into this project.
These Jokers are designed to serve different purposes depending on the game. They can serve as wild cards, they can be used to choose an item at random, or act as spare Kingdom cards.
Since I've done a lot of work as a Jester over the years, I brought out my costume to model for these cards.
I created this felted mural of the four kingdoms to go with the mobile app King's Square Solitaire.