Calendra, Part #9: Theming – The Irish Cable

This is an image of the celtic knot pattern used on both the front and back sides of the cards in Calendra

❖ Version History ❖

6th of July, 2020
With the Ferric Fable on the mind I could not help myself from ferociously spending the next entire day working on more art to help make the game feel more subtly Irish and Celtic in nature. What better way to do this than to add a common Celtic Knot along the trim of the card designs? I had always had a fondness for drawing these back in the day (when once upon a time I lived upon the emerald isle), so I began creating a grid to build my knot into the left and right space on either side of the rune box of each card design.

It was a straightforward process filling a large area of the card, but then I was met with a special challenge when I came to the top & bottom of the card. These areas are where I had built circles into the card frame for game numbers and symbols. I somehow had to make my knot wrap around these circular edges unbroken. This took quite a bit of time, but luckily, when it was done it could be easily mirrored onto the other side of the card.

One issue with the knot design is that it was very busy looking and distracting to the eye at first. When in full black the Celtic knots were a fat grid that overpowered the eye from paying attention to the other important details. To help alleviate this, I brought the opacity down to a staggeringly low number. This way, when printed the knots would mostly be the same color of the background, and only gently blend into the area where the eyes do not have to look. It took several trials to get the right color to appear, but eventually perfect match was selected.

With the symbols, runes, font, text, and now Celtic art imported into the card it was really starting to look like a complete design. There was only one major issue… the cards had no back designed to them yet. Right now the back side of every card is blank. And so another opportunity to add more thematic art was born. Stay tuned for our next Design Journal for this fun art addition! ^_^*