This project was a little bit of a weird one. I had done a bunch of the local farmers markets in my city and wanted something that felt less out of place than all my weird fantasy stuff. It’s a rural, farming community, and so I thought a deck of farm-themed playing cards might be fun.

Since these were my most plain cards yet, working out the aesthetic wasn’t too much work. I knew I wanted them to be brown and very traditional, and my printing company had just released a new “eco-cardstock” that had that perfect grainy look I wanted.

I decided that the icons would be slightly modified versions of the traditional suit icons, tweaked to make them more closely resemble what they were supposed to represent in real life, with the exception of the heart, since realistic hearts are horrifying and grotesque.

for the face cards I knew I wanted to draw animals, but being a light project I didn’t want to deal with anything too detailed. I decided to go for a kind of “watercolor” look.

From there it was just deciding which animals went where. I did this by first compiling a list of animals to be included and then finding four categories to sort them into. More livestock-centric animals went into the diamonds, birds went into the clubs, equine and bovine creatures went into the hearts, and finally the spades ended up being a kind of miscellaneous bucket.

For the jokers I initially wanted farming equipment, but tractors are the only good-looking piece of farm equipment. After some frustration I settled on a farmhouse. I might end up changing these in the next print run though.

Finally for the backs, I knew I wanted to make a special set for my local town, since I had my stuff in the Chamber of Commerce and wanted to help them advertise. On the back of the “Barriere” cards I featured a prominent river in the area. I also ran off a few sets to sell online with a more generic back featuring a farmhouse.

I enjoyed this project. It was incredibly quick and easy, and a great light project. I did a very small print run and am not sure if I'll do another run after I sell these ones. I may end up making some modifications and doing a larger run of these decks in the future.