bunny cards draft

content/bunny-cards/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,82 @@
+---
+layout: base.njk
+title: bunny cards
+permalink: /bunny-cards/
+draft: true
+---
+
+{% css %}
+img {
+    display: block;
+    max-width: 20em;
+    margin: 0 auto;
+}
+{% endcss %}
+
+## The story so far
+
+I've always loved playing cards. The first thing I can remember making is a deck of "tarot cards" with pictures of household objects on them. An egg timer represents the passage of time, a red pen represents harsh critique, an eraser represents learning from mistakes, etc.
+
+I'm also a big fan of magic tricks and pin-up art, as you'll know if you've ever browsed my [characters](/characters) pages. Many of my oldest characters are just an excuse to pay someone to draw a woman in tight clothes doing magic tricks.
+
+So really it was only a matter of time.
+
+### The Velvets
+
+Some time around 2022 I made the connection "I could design pin-up characters and get a custom deck of cards made." Specifically, I had the idea to have a family of anthropomorphic rabbits called "Velvets" who each represent a different playing card. It works, right? Magicians summon cards and magicians also summon rabbits, so why not have the rabbits as the cards?
+
+My favorite commission from the Velvets design phase is Seven Spades, Starship Captain. This was drawn by [CeeDoubleU](https://bsky.app/profile/ceedoubleu.bsky.social) and features a horned demon bunny joyriding a Y3 from the game [Homeworlds](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/14634/homeworlds), because there isn't enough fanart of Homeworlds and this was a fun place to start.
+
+<img src="2022-06-07-ceedoubleu-seven_spades.jpg" alt="a white rabbit with red horns, bomb-riding a yellow pyramid through outer space">
+
+### Fortune's Court
+
+In 2023 I revisited the "Velvets" and asked "okay but are they sexy enough?" I wanted to make something that my inner teenager can properly lust after. I had recently gotten a really good commission done from an artist called Poeynony (known then as Vee). This piece was a two-character pinup featuring my Magenta and someone else's character, named Fleura.
+
+<img src="2022-poeynony-magenta-fleura_magic-bimbo-nerds.jpg" alt="a pink catgirl magician and a brown humanoid assistant, performing a 'headless woman' illusion">
+
+This is probably the single "fanciest" art I've gotten from any artist ever. It also made me realize that I really, really liked oiled up skin, and considered re-designing the bunny cards as humanoids. I was inspired by two primary sources The first is [this pinup](https://e621.net/posts/385742) by Shonuff from 2013 featuring a blonde bunnygirl and a tanned catgirl holding playing cards. The second is [this canon](https://e621.net/posts/1763961) established by averyshadydolphin back on Tumblr circa 2019, which depicts a war between two alien queens named Kitty and Bunny, with a "red versus blue" motif. Notably, Kitty and Bunny's servants make heavy use of mind control, and therefore wear black glasses at all times to defend themselves.
+
+Poeynony, CeeDoubleU, and another artist friend named Airyu all helped me design my own Kitty and Bunny characters, who exist in a new canon I'm calling "Fortune's Court".
+
+(todo: insert images here)
+
+The idea here was that Bunny would appear on all of the red face cards, and Kitty would appear on the black ones, but with the black replaced with dark blue.
+
+### Royal Fluffle
+
+Somewhere around this time I decided that the Fortune Girls were a little too complex for what I had in mind. They were really designed to appear _together_, and separating them for a solo pinup on each card doesn't have the same impact. So I went back to the design table. What if we revisit the anthro rabbits, but still have just one for each face card? Maybe the twelve standard face cards could correspond to the twelve months of the year or the twelve star signs or something like that.
+
+Poeynony was _again_ extremely helpful in the design here. She pitched me a few concepts for the rabbit court cards, or "royal fluffle" as I started calling them. Similar to HuffsLove's [Tome of Imps](https://e621.net/wiki_pages/58396), they have long ears and gold jewelery. Each one has painted cheeks that match their suit, as well. I went back and forth for a long time on how to design _twelve_ of the damn things and make them all feel distinct. Ultimately I ended up writing fourteen "poses" (twelve face cards and two jokers), each themed around one of five magic props: spades get swords, hearts get cups, clubs get wands, diamonds get coins, and the jokers get a magician's hat. At this point I already knew that I wanted the two jokers to be inspired by The Fool and The Magician, so that we could do an expansion later and turn this into a tarot-compatible deck.
+
+(todo: insert design sketch bonus here)
+
+---
+
+## Fun and Functional
+
+### Great Spots
+
+(todo: explain the jumbo pips design decision)
+
+### Post-Balatro
+
+Up to this point, playing cards were a relatively niche interest of mine. Early in 2024, everyone else suddenly started talking about playing cards, too. Turns out some guy called LocalThunk made a video game called [Balatro](https://www.playbalatro.com/) which is something of a cross between a dungeon crawler and a card solitaire game. You collect playing cards and match them into "hands" like Full House or Royal Flush to deal damage to "Blinds" which are the game's faceless enemies.
+
+Balatro also changes up the card colors. Because flushes are such an important mechanic, you need to see at a glance when five cards are the same suit, and making Clubs and Spades different colors really helps. When I went back to "normal" playing cards later, I found it was a quality of life change that I hated to lose. So, the Bunny Cards are bright, colorful, and high contrast.
+
+I couldn't just use _any_ high contrast colors, of course. Everyone associates the ace of spades with the color black. And hearts are always red, unless you're fighting a skeleton or something. Clovers are obviously green, and diamonds... well, they could be blue, like in minecraft, right? Heck, the [Looney Labs Color Dice](https://looneypyramids.wiki/wiki/Color_die_(Equipment)) has this arrangement, except that spades are dark purple and yellow stars are added as the fifth suit.
+
+But that doesn't quite feel correct, because now we have Hearts and Diamonds, the original "red suits", being opposite colors, red and blue. Bunny Fortune wouldn't be very happy having to give one of her red suits over to the blue Kitty club, right? So what if we make all the red suits "warm" and the black suits "cool"? The "warm colors" are fairly limiting, you really only get red, orange, yellow, and maybe you can convince people that "salmon" is its own distinct color separate from those three. So diamonds yet yellow, and then clovers get a cool blue to increase contrast.
+
+What about the joker bunnies though? They were going to be gold stars. But there's just no way to get another shade of yellow in there that looks distinct from diamonds, while still being readable on a white background. The stars have to change. Ideally they'd be a neutral color, something neither warm nor cool: green, magenta, or gray.
+
+Green is off the table -- it wouldn't be fair to clovers if jokers were greener than them! And in my tests, people interpreted magenta as a warm color. So, gray it is. I guess these are silver stars instead of gold stars. And then Spades have to be a dark purple instead of true black, for contrast with the jokers.
+
+All this trial and error to arrive at the same colors that Balatro already uses for its high-contrast accessibility mode. Ah well, now you know why Balatro's diamonds are yellow-orange!
+
+### Holy Aces
+
+(todo: explain the ace designs)
+
+(todo: go back and add more links to artists, maybe host copies of shonuff's and avery's work)