How We Create Our Playing Cards... The Hand-drawn Process Behind Every Deck

Every A. Haines deck of playing cards begins the same way: with a conversation. Not a brief, not a mood board, not a prompt typed into a content generator, but a conversation - between two people who have been making things together for years, throwing ideas at each other until something catches. That is where every deck starts, and it is the detail that everything else flows from.

This is an honest account of how we make our playing cards - from the first idea through to the finished deck in your hands. We are writing it partly because people ask, and partly because in a market increasingly saturated with AI-generated artwork and "low effort" designs, we think it matters to be specific about exactly what we put into our playing card projects. 

It Starts With A Conversation...

A. Haines Playing Cards is a husband and wife team: Alex handles the illustration and design; Charlotte develops the narrative, themes and written elements that give many of our projects their depth and appeal. The process begins with both of us - discussing themes, testing concepts, pulling on threads until we find the one that feels worth pursuing. 

Some decks develop into full stories. The Love & Retribution collection, for example began as an epic Victorian period drama/romance - Charlotte developed the 1800s world of Fairhurst Manor, its characters, its internal logic, the emotional arc of the two volumes - before a single line was drawn, directing Alex through the illustrative process to bring the story to life through playing cards.

Other decks are more graphic in nature - a strong visual concept, a colour palette, a defining aesthetic - and move more directly from discussion to illustration. The Golden Eagle Vintage Playing Cards collection, with its British Racing Green palette and antique typographic sensibility, is closer to this end of the spectrum. Either way, the starting point is always the same: two people talking and discussing an idea. 

The Illustration Process - Genuinely Hand-drawn

This is the part we are most often asked about, and where the distinction between real hand-drawn work and the AI-generated or vector-assembled decks that dominate the market becomes most apparent.

Alex draws everything from a blank canvas. Every court card, every pip arrangement, every back design, every Ace, every Joker - drawn individually, by hand, using a Wacom pen and tablet in Adobe Photoshop, working directly onto the print templates. The stylus is the brush. The tablet is the paper. The process is the same as it has always been - mark making, revision, correction, refinement - just without the ink and the mess - take a look below at Alex drawing our Triton 42 Clubhouse Antique Restoration project:

The critical distinction is that we do not use vector drawing tools, pre-made design elements, or generative software at any stage. Vector illustration tools produce mathematically perfect lines - smooth curves and precise angles that have a characteristic look anyone who works in design will recognise immediately. Our work does not look like that, because it was not made like that. The lines in an A. Haines deck have weight and variation - the shading has texture -  the imperfections are deliberate and integral to the result.

We call it "perfect imperfections" - the quality that makes a hand-drawn line immediately identifiable as such. Not a flaw to be corrected, but the thing that tells you a human being made this. It is the same quality that makes an antique playing card from the Goodall or De La Rue era look the way it does - drawn by craftsmen whose hands left their mark in every stroke. We draw heavy inspiration from that era: the great British card makers of the late 19th and early to mid-20th century, from whom we borrow not a single element, but whose aesthetic philosophy we carry forward, while retaining our own identity and adding our own modern twist.

How Long Does It Take?

A complete deck of playing cards contains fifty-four cards. Each one needs to be designed. The court cards - twelve in total - are the most demanding: each is a considered composition drawn to work within the specific constraints of the card format, readable at a glance, coherent in mirror symmetry, and possessed of enough character to reward closer inspection. The back design needs to tile perfectly. The Ace of Spades needs to earn its place as a maker's statement. The Jokers need to work both individually and, in many of our decks, as a pair forming a single diptych scene when placed side by side - such as in our Cryptids: Black Shuck playing cards.

A relatively streamlined classic style deck may take a couple of months of focussed work. A fully illustrated narrative deck - like Love & Retribution, where every court card is a distinct character with a specific identity and backstory - can take much longer - with some projects taking nearly a year to complete. Most projects sit somewhere between those two points, with complexity and available hours determining the timeline. We manage everything in-house: concept, development, illustration, editing, colour work, and print-setting. The only part of the process we do not handle ourselves is the printing, because we do not own a press. Everything else stays with us.

Our Thoughts On A.I. "Artwork"

The playing card market has a problem that the broader creative industry shares: AI-generated imagery is increasingly being used to produce "hand-drawn" or "illustrated" playing cards, and the results are being sold to collectors who believe they are buying original human artwork. We want to be direct about our position on this:

We will never use AI to generate artwork: not to speed up the process, not to fill in background elements, not in any form. This is not a commercial calculation - it is a straightforward ethical position. AI image generation works by processing vast quantities of existing human artwork scraped from the internet, and reproducing elements of it without the knowledge or consent of the artists whose work was used. It is, by any reasonable definition, theft at industrial scale.

We know this not in the abstract but from direct experience. Our own work has been taken and used without permission to "create" a design or illustration that has appeared in someone else's deck of playing cards on more than one occasion - we are giving the benefit of the doubt to assume that it has been scraped by a generative AI algorithm and not directly stolen by a human (who has then run it through AI software to get the finished result - which is often passed off falsely as human-generated).

A.I. undoubtedly has applications that are genuinely useful - we do not dispute this - but  playing card illustration is not one of them - not because the technology cannot produce something that looks superficially similar, but because the value of a hand-drawn playing card lies precisely in the fact that a human being made it. The hours, the decisions, the imperfections and the craft are the product. Remove those and you have removed the thing you were selling. Decks can literally be generated in a matter of minutes using this process by a complete novice: while it might be fun for an individual to play around with, why would anyone pay good money for this? 

The Finished Deck

Once the artwork is complete and the print files are set (by us - a process that can take hours and even days of painstaking work) they are passed to our manufacturers to be printed. We use only the best playing card printers in the world, chosen for their exacting quality control and premium stocks and finishes - printers like Legends and WJPC - and we think you will agree that the results are always outstanding!

If you would like to see the full range of what we make, every A. Haines deck is available at ahplayingcards.com . And if you would like to follow the process as it happens - new decks in development, works in progress, behind-the-scenes updates - take a look at our Patreon Membership and find out more.