The story behind our card art
tell us a story? began with art created by Midjourney, an AI image generation software.
It was affordable and quick to produce, which was nice, and it also had a quirky ethereal quality that matched tell us a story? and its open storytelling style.
That said, AI art has some very well-recognized issues.
It takes work away from talented artists and it steals content from them too. It builds its images from publicly available source material (without attribution), and that source material has largely been produced by humans, through their own creative processes.
Leaving AI behind; the talents of Martha Schnee
We addressed the issues with AI by prototyping with Midjourney and using its art to launch our website and our Kickstarter campaign.
One of our Kickstarter goals was to get enough funding to be able to pay an artist a fair rate to develop original artworks for our cards.
We met that goal!
As a result, we were able to hire artist Martha Schnee to design custom backings for tell us a story? !
We hope you agree with us that Martha’s art is amazing. It preserves the whimsical aesthetic of the AI art while also exhibiting the flair and creativity and originality that only human artists are able to offer.
While the AI art will still be available (for a short time and in limited quantities), the plan has always been to make Martha’s art the featured art for all future tell us a story? printings.
From fantasy to the future — It’s CYience Fiction!
The original deck designs for tell us a FUTURISTIC story? were created by the incredible Cy Hunte!
Cy is an artist from Brooklyn, currently based out of Western Massachusetts. They are inspired by creatures—the fantastic and the mundane—vessels, the human body, and all of the many ways to embellish it.
Their designs turned out perfectly—full of mystery and adventure while sitting squarely within their preferred aesthetic.
