Working on suite icons

So when I started working on invoke I never thought that I would have to create different suits. Turns out that I have already done so naturally.. Objects, actions, targets etc. during feedback on one of the playtesting sessions one of the players mentioned that it was difficult to tell "what was what". So I began to think about icons to show a clear difference between suits.

First concern was copyright. I wanted to ensure that all the icons were entirely of my design. Not that I mind paying for the rights to use someone else's hard work but I am a broke man.. So what does an artist do.. He designs his own.

I started by doodling as many concept sketches as I could on a single sheet of paper the idea was to get my brain out of any ruts. I must have drew over 50 different sketches. I did not spend too much time on anyone sketch because at this point all I was doing fishing for ideas.

I wanted to keep up with the magic theme. I researched magical symbols throughout history (discovering most websites on Viking runes are full of shit as none of them agree on the meanings).. The main problem was because i kept encountering conflicting meanings or designs that were directly related to an active religion. Out of respect to those who may still practice those religions I am going to avoid those symbols.

Examples of just some of the variations I created while working on the logo designs

After all that research and sketching I came up with a few designs that I think I liked. The next problem was they looked to amature like someone had sketched them on a piece of paper or something.

Knowing that I could not make the lines straight enough I chose not to paint these by hand.I opened up software I teach for presentations. The vectored graphics on this software will suit my needs nicely. Because these icons are going to end up the size of a thumbnail (or smaller) I really needed them to be sharp and easy to read. Black and white are the colors of choice for this design.

After creating the designs, I added them into gimp as a custom brush. Now I can add them to the existing cards easily.

For the target cards.. At some point, I was thinking about painting custom designs for the target cards however that is very time consuming and opens up the possibility for confusion. My current design uses the target in question suit as the primary artwork. This way just looking at the card you can see what suit is targeted by that card.

My next problem is that the factored graphics are very sharp and shows and inconstancy of design. This is fine for the suit icons in the upper left hand corner but not ok for the target cards as the icons look inorganic in comparison to the hand painted designs of the rest of the deck. My challenge is to alter the designs of the target cards enough to give the impression these images were painted by hand. I am currently researching other techniques to achieve this.

Knowing that I do have a tendency to try different designs that may be incompatible I have kept all the designs as layers making the previous design "invisible" . This allows me to go back to the a previous design at any point.