Designed by Sasha Dounaevski, the Alice in Wonderland Playing Cards is a fully custom illustrated deck with characters from Lewis Carroll’s iconic children’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The deck is beautifully crafted with love to each character and affection to details, but still, leaves some space for imagination.
As a card collector and a designer, Sasha realized that she wanted to create her own deck of playing cards.
The decision to create a deck based on the “Alice in Wonderland” was accepted for two reasons. First of all, it is still one of my favorite fairy tales, which always excited my imagination with its absurdity – even in my childhood, while studying at an art school, I wanted to draw illustrations for it, but I did not do it. Secondly, I wanted the idea that is directly related to playing cards and allows me to build the internal logic for the arrangement of illustrations.
The work on the deck was long and with interruptions – about two years. According to Sasha,
First, I tried to paint with watercolor and pencils, but I did not like the result because I was never a good painter. Then I drew with a black graphic pen, but I was not happy either. At some point, I scanned my drawings and after several attempts to process them, I got the idea for my style – a linear drawing with fine lines. Almost all the royal cards were reworked many times, from the characters themselves and their location on suits to color schemes. Finally, I came to the version that you see – in my opinion, it is both gentle but sharp, absurd but logical, “primitive” but rich in detail, just like the story itself.
Each suit represents a scene from the story and features iconic characters such as the White Rabbit, the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Hatter and the Queen of Hearts. The cards will be printed by Legends Playing Card Company on Diamond Finish.
The Alice in Wonderland Playing Cards is currently raising funds on Indiegogo and is only 3% funded. If you like what you read here and want to support Sasha, head over to the campaign page and claim a perk.
