ShyBrainsGetNowt | Zine Deck Playing Cards

Inspired by photocopied flyers and zines of the 80s and 90s, ShyBrainsGetNowt’s Zine Deck is a unique deck of playing cards. Each element was printed, cut out, and pasted back together and scanned in to create a super tactile, super scuzzy deck of poker cards.

The project was initiated after Kelv, the face behind ShyBrainsGetNowt, had to create and illustrate a new deck of playing cards in his day job. This led to a lot of research into modern contemporary playing card design, and a trip into the rabbit hole of crowd-funded decks. Kelv tells us; “I remember them all being very majestic and sophisticated, a place where minimalist concepts and precise execution were king, and that didn’t fit my punk rock aesthetic at all!”

Kelv had been tentatively experimenting with cut and paste Xerox art for a while, but during the first lockdown, this pursuit of something he physically had to cut and glue down really took off. He comments; “I felt there was an opportunity to make something more tactile and unique than the cards I’d been creating at work, something that would be a fun antithesis to the more cultured decks I had encountered online – it gave a structure to my scalpeling, and a purpose to firing up my sixteen year old laser printer!!

In a previous life he was the man behind Hundred Million LTD, a company that successfully crowd-funded the Sugar Skull Spoon in 2013. They also went on to fund the CMYK Playing Card deck (each suit was a CMYK print colour and each numbered card was a different percentage of ink on the card). This familiarity with artworking a deck of cards, and liaising with the manufacturers, made the process a lot less intimidating for Kelv, so it was a no brainer for him to try and get the deck mass produced.

“The design process was the most fun part,” says the designer. For Kelv, it was very important to keep the essence of a traditional playing card deck: there are rules about which Jacks only have one eye showing, which weapons each suit holds, and that the King of Hearts is shown sticking his sword into his own head. He started with a blank deck of white cards and drew upon recurring themes from his Instagram grid which included ghosts, flamingos, skulls, and bugs.

First, he created the court cards for each suit; a deliberately whimsical choice to go against the norms of other more ‘grown-up’ crowd-funded decks on the market. The next step was to design and artwork an entire deck of number cards before printing them out. Each element on each card was then individually cut out with a scalpel, before being pasted back down to give a genuine, analogue, hand-made feel.

The cards were then scanned at 600dpi: sometimes Kelv ripped them, sometimes he scribbled on them, and sometimes he manipulated the cards mid-scan to create warped wonky artwork. No digital effects or Photoshop scripts were added to the deck (apart from flipping the black to a neon pink colour for the red suits), every scuff and scanner-warp really happened!

With the crowd-funded rewards being fulfilled in the summer, Kelv has a limited stock of the first print run available through his Etsy store. He hopes to soon bring the same subversive attitude and grungy mentality to tarot cards, board games, ceramics and more!

@shybrainsgetnowt

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