The Enneagram

[Kenney]

This is a deck I have been working on and off of for a long time. Every year or two an idea comes along that will fit with the original concept and I find myself resurrecting the project from the dust heap in the closet.

These are the front of the cards in order of the zodiac signature in the upper right corner of each card.

The art is a workup of a more involved animation I built in blender that depicts the functioning of an enneagram. I had so much effort into all of these isometric designs I never could bring myself to throw them out. One day out of boredom I started coloring some with Copic markers...and that turned into the new Trine deck

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Thanks for taking moment to look at this,

[Harvonsgard]

Let's see what you got in mind for the back design. I like the concept of the faces a lot.

[Kenney]

The one I did for this, I designed for doing a riffle fan, I had been practicing that a bit at work a while back.

To give a better idea of the effect I was going for with this I set up a scene in blender with a simple fan.

I did these left hand light colored back ground right handed dark back ground

I just ordered an MPC of the right hand deck

[Harvonsgard]

Thumbs up from me. Looks good. Some thoughts of mine would be:
• maybe add another circle to the back that is full bleed to the edge so that you have another detail when fanning the deck
• faces could look better without the frame
• maybe fully custom pips would be dope for this deck, too. Something geometrical as well, instead of the classic French ones

[BaconWise]

This project looks really intriguing! Will the artwork be vectorized for the final version or will it remain hand-illustrated?

I really like the border design and how it connects to each pip. The Club pip looks a bit oversized in comparison to the other three pips (or maybe they are undersized?). Also, the heart faces don't seem to have the same tapered effect on the border line as the other suits.

I look forward to seeing this progress and thanks for sharing!

[Kenney]

Rather than posting this as fifty something pictures here is a link to my gallery

https://perfecttrine.com/trine-gallery/

The animation is neat but it doesn't give each card the time it deserves.

[Kenney]

Thumbs up from me. Looks good. Some thoughts of mine would be:
• maybe add another circle to the back that is full bleed to the edge so that you have another detail when fanning the deck
• faces could look better without the frame
• maybe fully custom pips would be dope for this deck, too. Something geometrical as well, instead of the classic French ones

I did do a version of the back that has a spiraling brass ramp under the spheres, almost exactly what you're suggesting. The original art has the feel, putting that piece in there after the fact takes away from the emptiness that those things are floating in.

The frame is for a very specific purpose. When I get the deck in my hand I'll lay a few cards down and I'll show you. Every bit of the art here is for a specific purpose, every little thing means something and is where it's at for a reason... Other than a couple things that aren't

All the same I have to completely agree with you that the frame is rather distracting. The Alchemy deck I made does not have the frame. The Alchemy art doesn't conform to many of these rule sets that the Trine art follows. The Alchemy deck I made sure that every card looked really cool and pretty. In this one when something looks wrong or unbalanced it's because that is just where it fell. For the sake of artistic balance I have nudged things this way or that so that lines didn't converge, and to avoid areas of high compression that I couldn't get into for good detail.

There's no pips on any of these cards. Just 56 different sigils.

Sorry it has taken me so long to reply, as soon as I said I was done with this deck the wife smacked me with a long list of things to do.

[Kenney]

This project looks really intriguing! Will the artwork be vectorized for the final version or will it remain hand-illustrated?

I really like the border design and how it connects to each pip. The Club pip looks a bit oversized in comparison to the other three pips (or maybe they are undersized?). Also, the heart faces don't seem to have the same tapered effect on the border line as the other suits.

I look forward to seeing this progress and thanks for sharing!

I could vectorize them... Should I? It seems like an extra step if I'm going to do a high quality one that looks like my actual artwork. It does give an interesting anime manga feel when I vectorize it and clamp down the number of colors used. That's a very cool cell shaded look.... But I could have saved myself a lot of work and just done that in the first place. Which makes me hesitant to do it after the fact. That's the sort of the effects I would like to plan into and create properly.

The heart's are always looking different, I have to agree those blues are just screaming. And the reds are coming across a little flat on the clubs. I'm still wrestling with the photography end of this. Probably going to wait for a nice calm morning before the sun rises take some pictures during the golden hour and see how that works. The saturation issues all come down to the temperature of the light around me and the limitations of the equipment. I am forced to take the photos with Samsung s21ultra. I know the phone will do it, I just have to keep pecking at this until it's right... Or I will have to mail the art to a photographer and have it done professionally.

[Harvonsgard]

... instead of the classic French ones

There's no pips on any of these cards. Just 56 different sigils.

Lost in translation. I do refer to the things below the indices as pips. Like you have the corner index (7, J, Q, ...) and below (or part of it) the classic french suits (clubs, diamonds, ...), this contrast between the sigil art but classic indices is something I find rather uninteresting for your deck imho. I hope this explains it better.

[Kenney]

... instead of the classic French ones

There's no pips on any of these cards. Just 56 different sigils.

Lost in translation. I do refer to the things below the indices as pips. Like you have the corner index (7, J, Q, ...) and below (or part of it) the classic french suits (clubs, diamonds, ...), this contrast between the sigil art but classic indices is something I find rather uninteresting for your deck imho. I hope this explains it better.

I can't help but agree with you. It's a line that I have jumped back and forth on a few times. A few years ago I had used just the symbols for the elements... It looks nicer. Actually looked really cool.

But I really could never get the hang of playing solitaire without the French suits. And the original point was always that it was a deck of cards.

And the same goes for the colors. I spent a couple years with the colors for the indice so they match the card using the element symbols. And after that long it still didn't feel right to me.

[Kenney]

Got my first deck back from MPC they're a bit dark as I expected. Photographing the deck is going to be my biggest hurdle now, probably going to have to build a studio and buy a decent camera to do it and get the results I want.

This picture shows why the borders are built the way they are. Laying down the cards in this fashion creates a hexagram from the book of changes. This is how I prefer to draw my hexagrams, it's a lot of trouble using sticks.

Not a very good fan...MPC cards are way better than they were a couple years ago. Sorry for all the lousy pictures here I just woke up and I don't feel like setting up a room.

Thanks for looking.

[Kenney]

I removed all the jitter and stretch that was sneaking in at the photography stage. In order to get everything to pop, the color correction and masking turned into a big task. I am still finding little things to clean up. I definitely learned a lot that I will just do as I progress next time.

I worked the new indices in, that I designed for the next deck. Since I had masked the old ones out, I could swap things around easily.

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[Harvonsgard]

Still not a fan of the classic suits for these but understandable if you wanna keep them somewhat playable or as a nod to classic playing cards. I like the changes made though; way better than the first draft imho. The bigger curve adds dynamic.
The animation has crazy fps btw. would be cool to have some stills of the cards to focus on details.

Edit: Usually on smartphone so, I overlook stuff once in a while. I like the I Ching idea a lot, fun detail. I just realized it now. Not necessarily a fan of the dot. I don't get why some yin have them and some don't.

[Sophisticarded]

@Kenney I really enjoy this design and I love the flipbook effect. How are things going? Are you still working on the deck?

[Kenney]

I am still plodding along with this project. I took every bit of feedback to heart, maybe too closely at times. As much as I want to thank everyone for their reflections, it was the wife that has been the most tenacious...i suppose that is her role.

To begin with I have toned down the scope of the project, even though it would seem to most to have expanded. I have removed the Astrology and the I ching. Those are great ideas that deserve their own place and time. This allowed me to focus on the Enneagram and the small mountain of art I had created along the journey of creating the animation, The Living Symbol, that is on the faces.

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I re-designed the tuckboxes, this render from blender shows the tuck boxes with layers are that are designed for foil work. I have created shadow layers that are printed over the foil of various colors. I don't know if I will even follow through on this avenue, I just had a lot of fun figuring out how to do it and playing around in Blender. At the moment I am painting each of these tuck boxes with the Copic markers. The none-foil tuckboxes will have art created in the same vein as the animation on the faces.

g


it has been over a year....so much has happened and changed i could probably write a small book. thanks for taking the time to look, any and all opinions are welcome. you cannot be too harsh.

[Kenney]

I changed the title of this thread to reflect the changes I made in real life. This seemed like a better solution than beginning a new thread. I figured it was time to refresh the first card I made. the original art was made to hang on the wall. I spent the weekend breathing some new life into it and taking the resolution into account.

The greens are a little washed out, I can probably fix that with some real sunlight, I photographed the art in the middle of the night. But I think most of the over exposure is from using back lit digital media. I find it almost necessary to make two versions, one for print that is rather bright and one for digital that is dark.

[Pyramid.ink]

pretty cool project! i am such an amateur of mystic geometry i cannot not like it ahah

[Kenney]

It has been a long time, one could say I am easily distracted. I tried to throw in the towel on this project a few times. The wife and daughter won’t allow it. It was a lot of fun making decks. Not so much when it is time to share them, sell them, etc.

The first thing I did was I took everyone's advice that I received here to heart. I simplified the faces. The first time I shared the Enneagram deck here it was a conglomeration of three very different ideas into one deck of cards. The borders have taken their place in decks that are focused on the Yi Jing or Book of Changes. The astrological symbols have their own decks focused on the tarot astrology theme.

The second thing I did was admit I sucked at taking pictures. The pictures I took did the art an injustice from every angle. In the end I chose to do renders from Maya and Blender. Perhaps someday I will get to know someone who is good at photographing and making videos of products and what not. Until then it gives me an excuse to do something different.

Here the faces are cleaned up, color corrected for cmyk print, and then rendered at 16bit in blender to maintain the saturation.



The boxes I rebuilt from the ground up. I did the art in three versions a solid color, one in warm grays and one that is highlights. It was a great excuse to buy more markers. This way they print in cmyk and resemble the faces. But they are done in a way that if I ever have the resources they can be made with foil that has the lighting printed over them. I don’t know how that will play out in practice, but I have a few decks from LLPC that appear to do this with great results.