Once again the scribes group struck. One of the members had been posting a request for Playing cards as part of their Kingdoms A&S Scribal Challenge.
Having no idea what a playing card of the time would look like I did some fast visual research.
Lucky for me The Met in 2016 had hosted an exhibition of cards entitled World in Play. Unfortunately, many of the pieces have rights restrictions so you are not able to get a close look at them. But working with what I could see I settled on the Ten of Swords.
I worked up my sketch, all while cursing my inability to see crossed lines. After almost tossing the whole card out of frustration I laid down some color to try and correct my mistakes.
As you can see it took several layers to get colors to sort out. It still wasn’t as crisp as I would like but it would do.
From there I had to make choices to get the rest of the illumination to fit the space I had. The original was longer hence when scaled it got funky. I chose to do some of the border to keep it similar but wasn’t able to fit all the original detail in.
I sent it in satisfied with my effort. Honestly, it was a less than 24-hour piece with no prior research.
The final product. 
Details of the piece including my makers’ mark.
I want to state for the record, I was probably oblivious. Apparently, the caliber of research I should have done was more A&S Kingdom Level not casual “Hey look at the pretty”. That dawned on me as I checked out the page to see the other entries.
They are all jaw dropping with beautiful documentation.
Lesson in all this? If you are randomly going to enter other Kingdoms A&S be aware it is A&S.
