Homemade Hanafuda

Seems like every time I come across someone possessing the most mind-boggling levels of incompetence, lethargy, and childish stubbornness, I end up making something related to card games.
That's not actually true, I had this in mind and made long before I essentially drove someone to bawlete (you know what? I'm teaching that word to my auto-correct) their account by having the sheer gall and nerve to suggest that they do their own work and stop making excuses why they won't. I know, I'm such a complete and utter bastard of a troll. How dare I bully people into not leeching off others and standing on their own two feet for a change. Who do I think I am to write someone off as untalented because they say so themselves as an excuse as to why they post other people's work to their gallery?
I'll save the full story of the now-deactivated !Gaby127 for my Blogger page matsugawa.blogspot.com/2013/07… , since, in terms of what exactly happened, most of you can probably sing along:

I never said it was my work.
My stuff isn't very good.
I'm promoting their work (even if I'm not crediting them because I don't know who they are).
I do what I want (with other people's work and on a site where I'm only renting space at best).
Everybody else does it.

See, it's those last two that you have to put side-by-side (not that you have to, they say them close enough as is) to really grasp the pure incompetence on display.

Anyone who uses the excuse, "Well, lots of other people do this." when it comes to the wholesale copying of other people's work is absolutely worthless in every sense of the word. No, really, I mean that. It is such a pregnant declaration, putting the speaker's outlook into such crystal clear perspective that I don't even hear those words anymore. Instead, I hear, "I want attention, but I am afraid to earn it myself."

Some of you may be laughing or at least feeling very smug right now, given that here I am going on about originality when in fact this handmade hanafuda card is practically a reproduction of the "Full Moon and Red Sky" card from the Susuki suite, representing the month of August and one of the more valuable cards in a typical deck. It's all right here if you wish to see for yourself: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanafuda . I'd heard of hanafuda cards before, but all I'd been told is that they're Japanese playing cards. It's like how people say Shogi is Japanese chess, which, while certainly apt, doesn't give you nearly as much insight into how the game is played as you may guess. More recently, I saw a video from YouTuber and avid Nintendo collector Lithium017 showing off a special set of Hanafuda cards Nintendo distributed to members of their points club youtu.be/oJpBKlmq4UE . In that set, the "full moon" is a giant Boo-diddly (which is awesome). Going back to the original designs (which date back to at least 1800, putting them well out of copyright in case anyone feeling humorously smug didn't know), I really love this kind of artwork. I love its purity, its simplicity, its stark color palette, the contrast, and the way it all overcomes its own minimalist sensibility entirely on its own terms. Between this and the sumi-e inkwash paintings, every time I make a silhouette piece or a "red and black on white" piece, that's what I'm going for. That's what I'm trying to capture. This was a learning exercise, a test in patience and perception. So, yeah, I copied a design, but I did it to learn, and there's far more in my gallery that's unlike it than like it. It was also a way for me to finally use a piece of illustration board I had lying around that I was hesitating on using thanks to a nick in one of its corners from where my corner punch failed to bite through.

In case you're wondering, no, I'm not going to make a full set of hanafuda cards the way I made this one. Even with it being well within my 50-piece limit (typical decks have 48 cards), that would take forever, illustration board is rather pricey, and I've got another card game-themed set on my to-do list I can take up if I feel like it. I do find it interesting to have the white be what draws your eye instead of the red (like in my BaRoW pieces), especially when it's framed by black, so while I won't make any more hanafuda cards, I will take some of its themes and ideas into other works.