“52 Reasons to Love PDX!!” ~ Willamette Week

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Illustrated Playing Cards are

COPYRIGHT AARON TROTTER 2011

One Year Ago, I started an online fundraising campaign with Kickstarter.com to bring my vision to reality.  It worked.

52 Illustrated Playing Cards

Also available at:
Frye Art Museum
Elliott Bay Books
Seattle Art Museum
and Bellevue Art Museum

During  2 week-long visits to sketch 52 places in Seattle, I studied tourist maps and guide books, talked to locals, wandered around and discovered places.  Not every drawing is a well known icon of the city; some of the places found me while others were intentionally scouted out.

The drawings were made on location in my sketchbook, often in the rain.
I do hope that people will use these cards, but it’s not really about playing games.  It’s about Art, and the places that make this city special.

First Printing, Limited to 100 : NOW Available

In May of 2011 I visited Vancouver, BC and sketched 52 places to comprise my FOURTH deck of Illustrated Playing Cards featuring Pacific Northwest Cities.  Arriving by train from Portland, I stayed at a noisy backpacker hostel in Gastown and explored the city as best I could with limited time.

The last few days of my visit included the Stanley Cup fan riots which were a really impressive display of national pride.  That’s when I drew Granville street empty of traffic.

If you have a retail business in VAN and would like to sell decks at your store, please contact me for wholesale orders : aarontrotter@live.com

Astoria cards are SOLD OUT.

Six months ago I decided to create a special birthday gift for a 200 year old city.  During 3 visits I composed enough sketches of Astoria to make a deck of 52 Illustrated Playing Cards.  It is part of my Pacific Northwest series which includes Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, B.C.  Each deck features famous landmarks and neighborhood places.  To find the places that are included in this exhibition, I studied the tourist maps, talked to locals at Ft. George, and got advice from a barista for the main targets.

But sometimes the places just found me as I walked around exploring.  Some buildings spoke louder than others, like the abandoned Flavel house.  Along the Riverwalk, I was surprised by the wildness of the Columbia as a dramatic contrast to the tranquility of the river near Portland.

Since first release in November 2010, each printing has been signed, numbered, and limited to 100.  In the last year I’ve distributed over 5,000 decks of handcrafted cards printed in Portland, Oregon.   I started drawing Portland scenes to be made into greeting cards, postcards, calendars, and coloring books.  Eventually I had sketched over 50 landmarks and neighborhood places.  One night I was wondering how best to present my drawings to the public.  It occurred to me that there are 52 cards plus 2 Jokers in a deck of playing cards.
Sometimes I have to remind myself that this is really not about playing cards.  It’s about Art.  But I still hope you will play them.  Even if you don’t play cards, you can still hold them in your hands and shuffle the deck.  They can be arranged, displayed, or framed in different ways that showcase your favorite places.

Now is the time for a Handmade Revival.  It is my intention to contribute to a growing local movement towards beautifully made household objects that are usefull as well as pleasing to the eye.  My drawings celebrate history and place in an old-fashioned way that is influenced by the Renaissance etchings of Albrecht Durer and Andreas Mantegna.  William Morris, Howard Pyle, and the Arts and Crafts Movement, including the Pre-Raphaelites, have inspired my sense of design.   I draw on location, sketching the composition with a ball point pen.  Later I embellish and crosshatch the details at my studio (1627 NE Alberta), using my Great-Aunt Ethel’s 1910 ink pen.

By drawing on-site, I become a participant of each place.  The rain of the Northwest has an influence on almost every composition.  An average sketch takes less than an hour.  Usually I can pin down the initial sketch within a few tries, but sometimes I abandon the location, defeated, maybe to return later.  Most times I accomplish my goal and it’s like getting to the summit of a mountain.  Then I start looking for another one.  Since June 2010, I’ve drawn over 200 places in Portland.  Since February, I’ve illustrated 52 places each for Vancouver B.C., Seattle, and Astoria.
About the Jokers
There are 2 Jokers in this Deck of Cards.  The first Joker is an illustration of the National Mall in Washington, D.C.  It represents the direction I plan to take: illustrating 52 landmarks in every major city of the world.  The 2^nd Joker is a tribute to the Renaissance engraver Albrecht Durer, after his famous print Melencolia or Waiting For Inspiration to Strike, which depicts an artistic angel in deep contemplation of a truncated rhombohedron (a Geometrical Solid).  For Illustrated Playing Cards, I drew my own version of Durer’s print as a Portrait of the Artist at Work.  The Artist sits in his studio, considering the polyhedron shape that occupies his workspace.  Within the solid are 3 Primary Shapes (Triangle, Circle, Square) that form the structure of all other shapes in nature.  Around the cluttered studio floor are books, paintbrushes, pens, half-finished projects, and cards spread on a table.  Above his head, the Artist thinks about an Hourglass, Money, a Key, and a Boat.
~Aaron Voronoff Trotter