This was a concept I’d had for a long time; since 2015 in fact.
The project was born in collaboration with Russian model Oksana Bulyga. We wanted to release a batch of unique t-shirts, and the topic I suggested for them was, well, unique for the Russian art scene. As conceived, the drawings were to be made in a simple and clear graphic style; black-white-red with pin-up aesthetics. And then the idea arose to draw the girls as different playing card suits. Quite corny, but if you give each suit its own style and wrap it in the BDSM theme, then you get something absolutely cool. Diamonds — latex, Clubs — shibari, Hearts — submission, and Spades — domination.

Everything went well, we released t-shirts, but the concept had really sunk its claws into me — so much so that I didn't want to let it go. It felt incomplete and I was tempted to release real playing cards, a full deck with dozens of drawings! First, to test the idea, I made one card as an example and was amazed at how cool my black and white drawings looked on a black background. Especially with the Ben-Day dot texture harkening back to old newspaper and comics printing (this was suggested by the silk-screening process used on the t-shirts — it looked so cool I decided to keep it for the cards). I started drawing the cards in 2017. I studied BDSM for a long time to learn all the poses and gadgets. I also wanted to distinguish between different subjects clearly according to their colors and not repeat poses or concepts.

The most important dilemma in visual terms was to understand how to draw girls so that the drawing was understandable, no matter how the card is turned. Traditionally on playing cards, the pictures are always mirrored diagonally and that's how I drew the first card. But then I realized that this was too complicated and it would be difficult to make beautiful images that could be looked at upside down too. It was definitely a learning process. In the description of the deck, I named all the girls after heroines of my comics and explained what inspired me when creating it. It was important for me to clarify that all people (even fictitious ones) deserve respect, and any sexual interaction can only begin with consent.

For the Kinky Cards project, I organized another Kickstarter campaign and it still remains the most profitable of my 10 projects. Initially, I had to draw only 18 cards, but then I added as a supporter incentive that if I collected $10,000, I would draw the entire deck, and if I managed to raise $20,000, then I would release an additional “stripped” (NSFW) deck. This is what you see in this book.