Alice of Wonderland Playing Cards - designed by Artist Juan Solorzano as Kickstarter Project

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - June 30, 2013 - PRLog -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8OgfprcfnY

Hampton Roads, Virginia based artist, Juan Solorzano, has designed a custom deck of poker style playing cards called Alice of Wonderland Playing Cards on Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jsolorzanoarts/alice-of-wonderland-playing-cards-printed-by-uspcc) which will be printed by the United States Playing Card Company upon successfully reaching the funding goal of $19,500. He has created a video to describe his project.

His inspiration for creating this deck of playing cards comes from his love of great fantasy stories and fairy tales, along with the admiration he has for the Steampunk genre. One of these stories is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which was published in 1865. Since then, there have been many different adaptions of this story from films, animations, games and books. One thing he noticed was that most of these adaptations are derived from the same story of Alice as a little girl. He didn’t want to create another adaptation of the same thing, so he changed it. Keeping true to the storyline of Lewis Carroll’s original, he decided to write a story about Alice as an older person, around 19 years of age. In his version, Alice is a young lady and has visited Wonderland many times since her first appearance, and first encounter with the royals of the Kingdom of Hearts. At this point, he thought a lot about what happened in the end of Carroll’s story, when Alice unwittingly offends and upsets the Queen of Hearts in a silly court session, and is overcome by a bunch of playing cards falling on top of her. It was this part of the story that led him to create a different version of Wonderland filled with adventure and new characters.

Another area he draws his inspiration from was having served in 2 branches of the military – the Army and the Navy, from which he draws his military knowledge and experience to create epic sea, land and air battles in Wonderland. Add to that the admiration he has for Steampunk fashion, Steampunk themed films, and the décor of the Victorian Era, and he had a Steampunk Wonderland. From that point he started to re-imagine all the characters in Steampunk fashion, with the four suits from playing cards becoming four really large kingdoms, complete with their own military powers of sea faring Victorian ships and high-flying steam powered airships. He is also throwing in some air-pirates into the mix for an adventure-based story. Since the four main kingdoms in Wonderland, the Kingdom of Hearts, Kingdom of Spades, Kingdom of Clubs and Kingdom of Diamonds, are based on a deck of playing cards, he designed the face cards to be the actual characters in his story. He has kept the design of the numbered cards simple to reflect the de la Rue style of traditional playing cards. The back design of his cards have a Steampunk-ish look, while the face cards are drawn in line-art, keeping a minimalist design approach. Simple yet fancy floral patterns, gears, top hats, nautical design, and airships add to the Steampunk element of his cards, creating the concept he was aiming for – a Steampunk Wonderland deck of cards. His project on Kickstarter is active for 30 days, and runs from June 28, 2013 to July 28, 2013.

Kickstarter Link (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jsolorzanoarts/alice-...)