Making playing cards in Photoshop is extremely easy, especially since all the symbols for the four suits are included as Photoshop custom shapes. Of course, making the Ace through 10 of each suit is very simple, with no real skill involved. The difficulty starts with the face cards. This tutorial will walk you through some techniques to quickly create the King of Hearts. The same principles can be applied to the rest of the face cards.

The first step will be to use the Rounded Rectangle Tool to create a shape like the one above. Set your Radius to 10 px to match the exact rounded corners that I used.

Now, we’ll first start with an Ace to show you how to take care of cards A-10 in the suit, before moving onto the face cards. Once we’ve got our basic card shape, we’ll need a suitable font to identify the card. On my system I went with Birch Std.

Now, using the Custom Shape Tool, I loaded all the extra symbols that ship with Photoshop and then selected the Heart Card shape and drew it under the A. I then copied the layers and flipped them both vertically and horizontally and positioned them in the opposite corner. Finally, one larger heart in the center rounded off the Ace card.

Moving on to the King, I started off by duplicating the Ace card completely. I then changed the A to K on both sides, and then drew a white box with a light blue stroke applied to it.

I turned rulers on (CTRL+R) and then made a few guides. Now when making with face cards, realize that we only need to draw the top half, and once that’s completely done we simply mirror that image below. To start out with the graphic of the King, I used the pen tool to create a basic shape for him.

 I zoomed in and used the pencil tool to draw the King’s hair. For his hat, I made a rectangle and used Edit > Transform > Distort to create the shape, and then used a yellow fill with a blue stroke.

 My King is pretty angry, because as the King of Hearts, he’s one of the suicide kings.

Now as I said, don’t worry about the bottom half. I’ve drawn on a bit of, mainly just to test out to make sure my patterns are geometric. Now you’ll notice that I’ve only used 5 colors: blue, red, yellow, black, and the white of the card. It’s important to limit the colors to give the card an authentic look.

Once we’ve gotten everything on the top figured out, it’s time to merge everything, flip it both horizontally and vertically, and then line it up.

There we go! Our angry suicide king is done!