Suit Up!

This is a huge post for a huge show!
Back in the summer of 2007,  Sean and I came up with the crazy idea of staging an exhibition… Not just any exhibition but one made up of a hand selected group of Australian artists all working together to produce a deck of playing cards.  Crazy huh?!

Because of the collaborative nature of the show we grouped the artists together based on style and who they had worked with previously.

Cavemen (Clubs) Diamond Heist (Diamonds) Rock Band – MotorHeart (Hearts) and War and Destruction (Spades) were all chosen by the artists. Sean and I took Jokers (above) because there are two of them and chose to do capitalist mythology. Each artist started with a sketch that we uploaded to Basecamp and from there the collaborative process began. Colours, technique and layout were tweaked and reworked until each suit was”complete”.
The entire process took 16 months. The show was on the 13th of Feb and is over now, but you can see all the art and photos of Suit Up here.

More about Suit Up in the full post…

Suit Up was entirely self funded so – to save a few thousand dollars – we had the task of collating the packs of cards by hand. Collation is probably the worst task I have ever done… It took us, and a rotating crew of artists, 2 weeks to make 400 packs of cards and 4 hours to sell them. We have since packaged more but we’re nowhere near finished and the cards are still selling fast!
But Enough of the technical side of things – here’s my Joker!
Sean and I both started by sketching out our characters, once they looked balanced we made them into vectors. As you can see in the first image the colouring technique we used is the same, we did this by sharing scanned images of watercolour splashes (made by Sean with colour direction by me.) and composed them with Photoshop.Here’s some photos of the exhibition at No Vacancy gallery in the heart of Melbourne.
(Suit Up logo designed by Nate Holmes-Trapnell) Some of the artists have a background in street art so we lined up a paint sponsor and let them lose on the back wall of the gallery – Above: Phibs (Queen of Diamonds).Above: Drew (Jack of Clubs) taking a break with Meggs’ and Sync’s art in the background. As well as producing packs of playing cards we also printed the work as limited edition Giclee prints (signed and numbered by the artists) and had them framed for opening night. As you can see, all the hard work paid off and opening night was huge! We had well over 500 people through the doors, served 24 slabs of beer, took 300+ photos, and sold plenty of art. Melbourne rocks! We still have some of the prints left (Signed and numbered editions of 10) and cards too. You can see the art and more photos of the event at www.suitupshow.com