Card Game Drawing

How to Create a Card Game Drawing?

The board game sector has never been more competitive. To stand out, publishers compete in creativity and offer us a diversity of modern board games with stunning graphics. Do you have a project to create your own card game? Deep reflection around its graphic charter is imperative.

Here's how to create a successful card game drawing, regardless of its mechanics!

The Importance of Drawing in a Card Game

According to historians, people have been playing cards for nearly fourteen centuries! Thus, the first playing cards would have appeared in China around the 7th or 8th century. It was then in France, around the 15th century, that playing cards took their so-called "traditional" appearance, in color and adorned with diamonds, spades, clubs, and hearts.

Long considered the norm, these cards are no longer the only ones available today. The diversity of modern board games has allowed the emergence of new playing or collectible cards, whose sophisticated design has little to do with their original style. Graphics that adapt to the game's needs and contribute to creating its atmosphere. Nowadays, modern games offer stunning graphics that greatly contribute to their notoriety among players.

Thus, you must pay very particular attention to creating the drawing of your card game, regardless of the type of game envisioned:

• deck-building;
• evolving card games;
• trick-taking games;
• collectible card games;
• traditional card games;
• specific card games;
• oracles;
• etc.

Although they don't rely on the same mechanics, all these games have in common the use of the same material, namely cards that can be associated with other elements (such as a board, dice, etc.)

The Steps of Creating a Card Game Drawing

Creating the drawing of a card game requires organization and the talent of an experienced illustrator. The ideal is therefore to call on a professional illustrator.

Why Hire a Professional to Draw a Card Game?

The stakes of your card game design are numerous:

• well-designed graphics increase your chances of getting your card game published. Before even seducing players, it therefore allows seducing publishers, who are fond of refined designs.
• Well-crafted, the drawing brings aesthetic appeal to the game and pleasure to players. Once displayed on store shelves, it's precisely this unique design that will attract and push players to buy the game.
• With balanced composition, the illustration allows fluidifying the game's mechanics, particularly thanks to clear symbols and icons, well-placed, and enhanced by well-thought-out and not too cluttered drawing. A game's success thus largely depends on its clarity.

In summary, the card game drawing must be as beautiful as practical. Faced with such stakes, illustration work cannot be entrusted to an amateur. The intervention of a professional illustrator is therefore a necessity.

The Specifications.

Before anything else, the illustrator has a long discussion with the designer to obtain all information related to the drawing of their card game:

• the game's mechanics;
• the context;
• possible characters;
• each card's function;
• symbols to represent and their meanings;
• etc.

Furthermore, to create the card game drawings, the illustrator must take into account all the formatting particularities:

• card format in portrait or landscape;
• their dimensions;
• space devoted to textual or symbolic information;
• etc.

The illustration work cannot therefore start before all information related to the game's universe, structural prerequisites, and formatting prerequisites are gathered. It's therefore from this raw material, these specifications, that the illustrator can think and define the game's graphic charter:

• color palette;
• line style;
• type of drawing (realistic, semi-realistic, cartoon...)
• etc.

Reference Research

Once all this information is gathered, your illustrator takes the time to conduct reference research to inspire their stroke.

All sources can be exploited here:

• already published card games;
• photographs and photo shoots;
• works of art in all their forms (painting, illustration, sculpture…);
• literature;
• etc.

Each illustrator is free to seek inspiration from sources of their choice, as long as they fit the game's needs.

In all cases, this reference research is an important step in creating the drawing of a card game. Indeed, it's difficult to convey an atmosphere idea using simple words. Using examples therefore allows clarifying and specifying the specifications.

Note: establishing a mood board from these sources of inspiration is a powerful tool for building a project with an aesthetic dimension, like that of the card game. Also called an inspiration board, the mood board helps build the foundations of the game's visual identity.

The Sketch

The seasoned illustrator is now ready to launch into the first sketch of each of your cards. They therefore start by drawing the main lines of each of them, to ensure that the action line and image dynamism work well.

This draft therefore serves to test the composition of the card game drawing and validate it with the game designer.

Attention, this step is not superfluous! It allows establishing the very foundations of the entire creation process to come. At this moment of the project, the illustrator exploits their creativity to the maximum, testing in turn all the graphic possibilities that come to mind. The sketch therefore doesn't aim to result in an illustration pushed to its smallest details, but it's a draft intended to validate the overall composition of the card with the drawing client.

Note: the direction of light is also chosen during this draft phase. Subsequently, the illustrator can thus realize the drawing's coloring according to the direction of light.

Once the composition is validated, the card game illustrator cleans up all their lines using their drawing software.

Color

During this step, the illustrator places their color flats on the digitized illustration. Flats that are then separated from each other, each being placed on a different layer.

For example: the flat used for the image background is the subject of a layer named "background".

The drawing is therefore composed of several layers separated from each other, which allows the illustrator to work and retouch them individually without modifying the rest of the drawing.

Shadows and Light

Once all color flats are thus placed on the sketch according to the direction of light (chosen during the sketch), the illustrator places the important shadows of the illustration "hard".

In other words, the shadow demarcation line is then very sharp. The illustrator thus benefits from better visibility on the placement of their different shadows. As the drawing progresses, the shading is softened to finally take the appearance of a realistic gradient perfectly integrated into the overall image. Obviously, shadows can be kept hard depending on light intensity or drawing style, and always according to the game's needs.

The illustrator then proceeds exactly the same way to mark the areas of the drawing that must be exposed to light.

Finally, before presenting the image to the client, the illustrator undertakes some small colorimetric finishes that can, for example, take the form:

• of adjusting the brightness of important areas of the illustration;
• of modifying color saturation;
• or even changing the image's tone to give it a particular atmosphere…

Retouches and Finishes

The card game drawing is now almost complete. However, it's submitted to the client's and their team's validation. The illustrator thus obtains general feedback on their drawing and can apply the requested corrections.

In some cases, rare however, they must then return to the sketch step to rework certain elements of the image.

Once corrections are applied and the image validated, the card game drawing is therefore completed and the illustrator's mission stops there.

In Conclusion

You'll have understood, the drawing of your card game must be worked with meticulousness to give your concept every chance of being published and purchased.

This is where the Cartoonely platform intervenes. Seasoned professionals in the illustration sector, we've surrounded ourselves with the best illustrators to offer you quality services. By entrusting your card game drawing project to our platform, you're assured of being supported by a specialist.

Don't hesitate to read our article on how to create an oracle.

But be careful, even the most splendid illustrations cannot hide a poor game mechanism. Your card game's success therefore depends jointly on its innovation, its well-oiled mechanics, and its perfect design.