Shakespeare playing cards: The making of

The artwork

So we’re at Mormor’s (my grandmother) in Denmark, it’s my sister’s birthday tomorrow and I got nothing. Most of my projects begin like this, in a rushed frenzy to have something spectacular to gift to friends or family by the next morning. Because Sarah is the kind of person who would play cards all day every day if there were others around her with that kind of psychotic stamina, I decided to design a deck for her. Not really knowing where to start, I did what I usually do when nothing’s happening in the imagination box: spill coffee on paper. It’s summer and mormor has got a lot of fruit growing in the garden. Across the street, there are bushes heavy with blackberries. I get some of these and mash them onto the paper too. Sprinkle a little ink into the mix and allow the colour to creep in twirls into the brown of the coffee and voila! What do we have? A mess.

I let it dry, and hope the gods send me some interesting patterns. First thing I saw when the papers where ready was Lady MacBeth. It just took a couple strokes with a pen to draw her out of the stain and make her visible to the general multitude. I look back at the colours and suddenly I’m seeing Shakespeare characters all over the place. Cleopatra comes into sight, and there’s Gertrude. Took me a little longer to find Hamlet and the others, but they were there. I hardly need to think at all when coffee does all the design work like this.

Editing

The work part starts when it comes to editing these bastards. It took a lot of photoshopping to make the characters clearer, find public-domain icons of the four suits and to flip the pictures horizontally so that they would be recognisable however you hold the card, but also don’t look awkwardly chopped. When this is done, I start feeling like it’s a bit heretical to base a deck of cards on Shakespeare plays and and not include any of the glorious text. Plus, finding the perfect phrase for each king, queen and jack gave me an excuse to spend a couple of happy afternoons scanning the plays and revisiting my favourite parts. In the end, I came up with what you see here. Happy Birthday Sarah.