Starting point

After the primer task in which we were drawing out our room layouts and all the items in it, it quickly became apparent that most of the items that are visible in my room serve no function aside from having nostalgic and aesthetic value.

I started to work with these little trinkets, drawing them again and again with different materials and different techniques. However, I wanted to go beyond the visuals; I wanted to tell the stories behind these cards and bring out their characters. I explored this idea during the animation task, making little gifs of my objects and making them into little trading cards.

To develop this further, I doodled these cards quite freely also giving the items types/elements and powers that would suit them. This was one of my favourite part of the project because imagining these items as characters with funky powers was quite entertaining.

To finish off this project, I made the booklet filled with both interpretative meanings of these advice cards (like in Tarot cards) as well as with their meanings to me; where they came from, when I got them and which people in my life I associate them with. It was quite a trip down the memory lane, bringing back up events I hadn't retrieved from my mind in a while. I am thinking of ordering these cards (as business cards with rounded edges) and I will print the book of meanings once it's complete.

Because these gaming/trading cards need a bit of explanation, I made these two charts illustrating what each symbol in the cards represents. I chose to have 5 types/elements; love, vanity, luck, knowledge and creepiness. These types roughly emerged from the categories I could split my items into. In a similar way to rock-paper-scissors, I chose each type to have one weakness and one type that they would crush. In reality, for this to be a working game I would still need to work on the logistics a bit more. For now, you can compare cards and choose a winner but it's still more of a choice than a certainty between some cards.

Finally, I gave all the cards a splash of cartoony colours.

Click the bottle to enter this project's website

Simultaneously, I was working on another way of bringing out the stories of my trinkets: tarot-type advice cards. This was a very enjoyable and meditative process as I painted 22 items in a detailed manner.

Click thumb for this project's website