Commission for a suit of promotional illustrations for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
This project was designed to tie into the Tokyo Olympics using traditional Japanese deities, or "Kami" as the focus. The output was to be used in a deck of playing cards and another type of deck: the skateboard. The Tokyo Olympics 2020 were the first to have a competitive skateboarding category.
The Olympics were considerably delayed by Covid and these contributions were never physically realised.
The following is the project that gained the interest of the creative leads at the Tokyo Olympics. Originally a boardgame designed to create interest in the Finnish indigenous community, known as the Sami people. This was downscaled to a deck of playing cards due to development costs. The linocut graphics were a hybrid of traditional Sami art and pictograms and a simple tribal character style I had been experimenting with at the time.
The project was named "Zeme" after the theorised Slavic root for the Finnish peoples. The literal translation being "ground" or "earth"
Original illustrations which informed the Zeme project
