Tigerbob: Elysian Garden Playing Cards
Gossamer announces their next digital collectible project and describes its connection to their evolving body of work.
The Tigerbob: Elysian Garden Playing Cards explores my unique, artistic interpretation of the common French-suited playing cards. Containing 52 cards, one card back, and one joker, this new project adds dozens of new pixel illustrations to Tigerbob’s visual language and marks the beginning of an important exploration between my digital pixel art and physical textile work.
The NFT project consists of 216 one-of-a-kind card illustrations. The mint will begin on September 5, 2024 and is facilitated by OpenSea. The official mint page is here: https://opensea.io/collection/tigerbob-playing-cards/overview
Read on to learn more about my artistic process and concept surrounding the work.
WHAT IS TIGERBOB?
For those unfamiliar with my work, Tigerbob is the name of my tiger character. I started drawing this tiger for my tattoo practice, which began in 2019, and I’ve iterated on its design ever since. What’s most important to me is that I never get tired of drawing this tiger. Originally inspired by Korean Minhwa (folk art), Japanese traditional tattooing, and Chinese textiles, I iterated on this design many times over the years and made it my own.
As a brand, Tigerbob is a collection of unique art objects ranging from knit apparel and accessories to home goods, prints, stickers, stationery, temporary tattoos, permanent tattoos, plush toys, books, and more. Each of these objects show either the Tigerbob tiger head, the Tigerbob “TB” monogram, or another motif or signature silhouette from my visual langua. I consider digital art objects, my NFTs, a large part of this collection and most of my drops inform physical counterparts and processes in some way.
I began Tigerbob as a profile picture (PFP) project when I created the Tigerbob Genesis NFT in 2022. It was important for me to emphasize the pixel tiger motif and ensure it was recognizable in its own right. The designs featured restrained color palettes a selection of smaller objects that exist in the Tigerbob world (“attributes” like animal companions that sit on Tigerbob’s head).
Growing the visual language of Tigerbob meant it was important to scale up the size of my canvas in a slow and controlled manner. While I dream of making a full-scale knitted dungeon map, it’s good for me to start small — so I decided the next series of drops will be based around various card games.
TIGERBOB LORE EXPANSION
The Tigerbob: Elysian Garden Playing Cards (or just Tigerbob Playing Cards) is a set of 216 1/1 NFTs inspired by the standard French suited 52-card playing deck. The NFT also includes a card back and a Joker card.
I think almost all of us have a memory of playing games with these cards. My parents taught me how to play many simple card games growing up. The solo game Solitaire was one of the first digital games I played on our first home computer, a Windows 95.
For those who are unfamiliar, the cards are very simple — four suits with thirteen ranks each. The pip cards, or numerical cards Ace (1) through 10, are usually represented by the appropriate number of suits for each rank; meanwhile, the court cards, or face cards (Jack, Queen, and King), are illustrations. I interpreted the full deck of cards so each of the 52 cards contain unique objects from the Tigerbob world. I designed several dozen new tiny objects beyond some of the things that might be recognizable from the Tigerbob Genesis collection.
Card ranks meant I could play with scale, and this helped me vary the type of objects I had to create for each card. Lower ranks, like 2♠ (Log) let me place a lot of detail into the two logs displayed; meanwhile, 10♡ (Mushroom) required that I fit ten objects on this card — so I picked subject matter that was typically smaller in scale.
The most exciting part of this project was designing the court. I spent the last several years making illustrations of humanoid-like creatures I call “Garden Maidens” (Tigerbob Bestiary and Grimoire).
These female characters precede Tigerbob by at least five years, having a huge role in the lore of Tigerbob and the Elysian Garden. I’m so excited to reveal the pixel version of these girls. The pixel versions of the girls are like paper dolls, or the digital Dollz/Dollz Maker sites from the late 90’s with mix and match outfits and hairstyles.
COLOR PALETTES
The Tigerbob Genesis collection had thirteen distinct color palettes based on different variants, characters, and moods of the Tigerbob tiger — these were almost like Tigerbob breeds. This time, I wanted to select colors based on some real-world concepts. I made four colorways resulting in 4 versions of the playing cards.
The first colorway, the “Elysian Garden” deck, is based on the 2025 apparel yarn colors. I always start designing the next collection six months to a year ahead of time because I source my own yarn. This set of eighteen colors spans both the Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter collections, spanning a range of tones from bubbly pink and lime green to deep muted blues, greens, and reds. For this deck, I wanted each card to look as unique from each other as possible.
The second colorway, called the “Classic” deck, is based on the five colors that you typically see printed on French Suite playing cards. I’m using red, blue, black, and yellow against an off-white background.
The third colorway, called the “RGB” deck, uses six colors. This set pops with a black background and red and brown outlines, with electric green, blue, and off-white as accents. This deck is inspired by one of the original Tigerbob Genesis colorways called Laser, where the tiger was outlined by a red ink. I also experimented with these colors with a matching lounge pant and sweater from 2023.
The fourth palette is called the “Vintage” deck. I spent some time studying antique playing cards and sampled some of the colors. This full palette contains 16 colors. I wanted to work with a palette that expressed aging of the paper and ink over time.
TECHNICAL CONCEPTS
These playing cards tie into some of my physical art projects, but not in a way you might think. Yes, I have plans to print the physical decks, and I would like to make a web browser Solitaire with the art from these cards.
I spent a year designing knitwear prior to this project, and all that thinking about how my pixel art could be interpreted as two-color knitting charts (intarsia designs) made this technical concept the forefront of this project, and all projects approaching my pixel art.
Designing garments on vintage knitting machines and modern whole-garment machines meant that I needed to learn how to interpret my illustrative style with the architectural limitations of knitting a design in only two colors. This technical limitation provided me with a new way to approach design in my pixel art.
The Tigerbob motif itself went through several checks so that the design could be knit in two colors. Expanding on what I learned, all 216 playing cards were designed first in true monochrome — using only black and white — so that each pixel object, and therefore the entire card, could be knit down in two colors.
After this, I experimented with multiple palettes of colors — ranging from five or six colors to almost twenty colors for each deck — pushing the boundaries of how complex a design could be physically created.
While I have no direct plans to knit the exact card designs as sweaters, some of the individual motifs will find their way into the next collection. I already started down this path with the 2024 Dragon Crewneck, one of the most complex designs executed to date.
EVERYTHING FITS TOGETHER
I consider myself a process oriented artist. Although the look and feel of the finished artwork is important, the mediums I work in are chosen based on their meditative qualities rather than their result. Tigerbob as a motif and a brand helps unify the multiple art mediums I love to work with — pixel art, illustrations, textiles and apparel, tattoos, and sculptures — under this recognizable tiger head.
And while through my art processes I am creating “products,” it’s also a requirement for any work I don’t make by hand be ethical in production and meaningful as an object that takes up space in the real world — something functional or wearable beyond being a piece of art, and something that has quality and longevity to be loved for a long time to come.
What I find attractive about my own work is the abstraction in the sense of each pencil stroke, each stitch, each pixel an important unit of a larger object. It’s directly related to how I translate a hand-drawn sketch by rebuilding it with a series of pixels, or stitches, or needle pokes for tattoos. I appreciate the reduction of an image to its most important visual language, so it can be understood at any scale. This is something that historical textiles have done so well — over a decade of textile research and collection helps me understand why I have this attraction.
Beyond these concepts, I also think about how textiles lead to computing, for example how developments of the jacquard loom lead to the use of a punched card. I am thinking about my relationship with computing, mathematics, and three dimensional geometry as I construct knitted garments from a pixel graph. The symmetries of process make all these processes interconnected, and I’m truly only scratching the surface of what I want to explore.
WHAT’S NEXT
Pixel art will become the forefront of my visual language. I plan to make two more sets of cards as NFTs, the next project a larger canvas illustrating the full tarot deck of 78 cards, and the following project a a true Tigerbob Trading Card Game.
I also have plans to continue my pixel and knitting exploration with knitted works on frames, and other non-wearable art objects. I’m working on getting a new, modern knitting machine where I can create more one-of-a-kind pieces and explore programming with more colors right in my studio. The context of knitting in a museum or gallery feels elusive compared to the gravity a woven piece holds in the same space — I want to change this narrative.
I’m learning how to not only lean into processes I know I enjoy, but also how to look at the work I make in different contexts and mediums I may not yet have expertise in.
I want to become more knowledgable with technical aspect of NFTs and blockchain. As many of you know I am continually impressed by the Terraforms project by Mathcastles, not only for the piece itself but also regarding the cohort of people who have been together by this project.
This collective of makers have been exploring work that explores what computer art could be, and makes attempts to celebrate the concept of protocol truth — a type of intellectual honesty marrying the artistic concept to the process and medium that work exists in.
I’m more than two years into launching Tigerbob and I still feel like I’m only scratching the surface of what my work could be. I’m grateful for everyone’s patience in trying to see it through as I explore these concepts that I’ve been working on for the past 20 years. I hope you’ll find something you enjoy in my version of the playing cards and I can’t wait to show you what’s coming next!
The Tigerbob: Elysian Garden Playing Cards mint will begin on September 5, 2024 on OpenSea. Learn more and mint here: https://opensea.io/collection/tigerbob-playing-cards/overview
