Playing cards have always interested me, mainly the illustrations on them. From tarot to your basic poker cards they are always visually appealing.
As a personal project I created a tarot card deck based on the work of Atsushi Ohkubo. I used each of his works as one of the suits and mixed them throughout the major arcana. I attempted to get the cards printed as part of a kickstarter, it did not meet its goal so the deck was never printed. I still value this project as it was a lot of work and I think I grew greatly as an artist. I did my best to illustrate each card in a way that looked similar to a manga panel, using a lot of cross-hatching and half tones.
Soul Eater represented Swords with the characters in the story turning into weapons.
Fire Force represented Wands, which is typically magic which is adjacent to the characters controlling fire.
Soul Eater NOT! was used for the Cups suit because that suit is centered around relationships and that is a major theme in the story.
Finally B. Ichi was used for Pentacles, usually centered around money and finance, B. Ichi centers around money and greed.
The Emperor card represents leadership and structure. I used Kurono to represent the opposite, or reversed. In Fire Force he is very rigid in his thinkning and abuses his power to hurt others.
The Lovers represents a major choice and partnership. Sho and Arrow have a strong brother sister type bond. Arrow taking on the role as protector very seriously.
The Devil represents obsession and a bondage to an inescapable self. The Kishin is the main antagonist in Soul Eater and is obsessed with becoming stronger than Death and steeping the world in madness.
The Sun represents joy, success and enlightenment. I used Justin Law and Tezca to represent both the upright and reversed meanings. Justin turns on his allies and tries to kill Tezca. The card represents that scene.
I was commissioned to create a playing card deck based off of the manga and anime One Piece. I was given a list of characters to include and told to do what I wanted beyond that. I was able to break up all of the characters into four groups for the suits and did my best to unclude how each chacracter first appeared with an alternative look for them from a different part in the story.
The hearts suit was the first four members of the strawhats, with tha Ace being Zoro.
The Spade suit was characters that weren't originally alligned either way with the strawhats and kind of follow their own wants, the King being Doflamingo.
The Diamonds suit was kind of the next set of characters to join the strawhats, the Queen being Robin.
The Clubs were the original four emperors of the sea before being replaced later in the series, the Jack being Kaidou.
The box front, has the gomu gomu fruit that Luffy eats, along with his iconic hat. While the back has the card back.