The Art Behind Pirate Patience™
Human Created. Digitally Crafted. AI Assisted.
The artwork of Pirate Patience™ was created through a hands-on digital design process
combining traditional human creativity with modern digital and AI-assisted tools.
AI played a part in that process — but it did not create the finished Pirate Patience cards.
From Real People to Pirate Characters
Several of the characters within Pirate Patience began with real people.
Captain Baldie, Captain Captain, Aqua Woman, the Captiness and Daisy May
were developed by transforming real-life subjects into their Pirate Patience cartoon counterparts.
A combination of Canva, ChatGPT and Grok was used at different stages to assist with cartoonisation, experimentation and image clean-up.
Those images then became components in a much larger, predominantly manual design process.
Building the Cards
The finished cards were assembled by hand as layered digital artwork.
Adobe software was used extensively during the earlier development of the deck,
with Affinity becoming a big part of the workflow later in the process.
Individual elements were positioned, resized, masked, adjusted and combined to construct the finished designs.
Some Pirate Patience cards contain more than 16–20 individual layers.
Colouring and colour correction were also undertaken manually using digital editing software,
including DaVinci and Adobe Illustrator. Further colour adjustments were made during production to meet specifications requested by
Ivory, the game's manufacturer.
Look Closely…
There is considerably more going on in the artwork than might first appear.
The numbered cards contain a deliberate hidden design feature.
Every numbered card contains a faded image representing the next numbered card in the sequence.
So somewhere within Card 1 is a reference to Card 2.
Card 2 contains a reference to Card 3.
And the sequence continues through the numbered deck.
These little Easter eggs were deliberately designed into the cards by The Captain Baldie during their construction.
They are part of the visual language of Pirate Patience and reward players who take the time to study the artwork.
One Deck. One Visual World.
Another important part of creating Pirate Patience was maintaining consistency across the entire deck.
Backgrounds, borders, edging, positioning, colour and recurring graphical elements were manually controlled
so that cards created at different stages still belonged to the same Pirate Patience world.
That consistency came from repeatedly adjusting and refining the artwork throughout development.
So, Is Pirate Patience AI Generated?
No.
A more accurate description is:
Pirate Patience is human-created, digitally crafted and AI-assisted.
AI tools were among the tools used during development, particularly for aspects of cartoonisation, experimentation and image clean-up.
But the finished artwork involved extensive human composition, layering, colouring, editing, positioning, visual continuity, hidden details and final preparation.
We estimate that approximately 90% of the artwork and card setup was completed through direct human design and editing.
AI was a tool in the creative toolbox — not the creator of the finished game.
Created With a Little Modern Technology — and a Lot of Human Imagination
Pirate Patience was never about pressing a button and asking a computer to make a pack of cards.
It grew through ideas, experiments, mistakes, revisions, layers upon layers of artwork and
countless small decisions about how the Pirate Patience world should look.
Modern technology helped us create it.
Human imagination made it Pirate Patience™.
© Pirate Patience™ / The captain Baldie.
Not everything was plain sailing…
Some artwork simply didn’t work.
Hours could be spent building, colouring and adjusting individual layers, only to discover when the finished artwork was laid onto the card that it just didn’t look right.
Some rendered images didn’t make the cut — so it was back to the drawing board: rebuilding, recolouring and sometimes starting again completely.
Because “that’ll do” was never going to do.
Captain Baldie quotes
"At times I needed to sit and work on it looking out to sea, feet in the sand, blue sky above, it help rid of the frustrations when things didn't go to plan".
