Lotería Artesanal

Category

Packaging

Roles

Illustration, Branding, & Fabrication

Programs

Illustrator

How could a popular card game reference its origins without simply reproducing its original iterations?

Lotería is a simple bingo-like game that uses illustrated cards instead of numbered balls. I often encountered cheaply produced versions of this game where the cards were too flimsy to handle and the illustrations lacked stylistic consistency. I looked to produce a higher-quality version inspired by Mexican traditional craftsmanship.

Investigation

The popularity of a Lotería set is determined by its illustration style, similar to tarot cards. The most popular version of Lotería is the Don Clemente set from 1887. This version’s cultural dominance has significantly shaped how people expect Lotería to look and feel.

Despite his immense influence on the development of Mexico’s visual culture, the illustrations by the renowned printmaker José Guadalupe Posada have been less well-known. To bring more attention to his work and other Mexican printmakers, their rich body of lithography and woodcuts were the primary inspiration for this project.

Process

Illustrating the cards was my first priority, and determining the rest of the aesthetic would follow. For this project’s timespan, I illustrated 14 of the 54 cards popularized by Don Clemente. I adjusted my illustration parameters as I decided on colors and printing material. I adapted my sketches to be executed in a single color with a secondary background color.

Many of the original woodcuts were printed on tinted sheets of coarsely textured paper, so I experimented with varying opacities of cyan, magenta, and yellow to develop backgrounds with equal values.

As I continued, I found myself pushed by the drive to essentially digitize the components used for lithography and woodblock printing, particularly the typographic ornaments. In all the printed material these ornaments remained at the same, a parameter that keeps the work truer to the source inspiration.