In the 18th Century Dr. Stukeley collected two sets of German-style playing cards (and some miscellaneous other cards) and had them mounted in a book which he later donated to the British Museum. These cards, which are emblematic of the German-Swiss style of playing cards, consisted of a badly degraded set printed in the 15th Century and a later version of the deck printed in the 17th Century. Examples found in other collections span the entire time period of the 15th-17th Centuries and make it clear this style of deck, in virtually identical form, was widely distributed throughout Central and Northern Europe. The images of the 17th Century deck were downloaded, cleaned, and enhanced to create a working deck.
GIMP, the free graphic image editing program was used to process the deck and create the individual images.
MakePlayingCards.com was used to print test copies of the deck on modern cardstock.
Images were downloaded from the British Museum and individually cleaned in GIMP. This process entailed removing blemishes, restoring damaged areas, and manipulating the colors to restore them to their original colors. The original colors were determined by comparing visual evidence in the images to determine what pigments had likely been used and then manipulating the color scheme to restore the colors to their original vibrancy based on other surviving examples of cards which used the same pigments and had not been degraded. A happy discovery made during this time was that some of the pigments which were assumed to be blue were in fact greens. This information has been forwarded to the British Museum along with a request for a multi-spectral image of the cards in question to confirm this.
In the case of cards which were too badly damaged to use the original image attempts were made to recreate the original image. These failed. It was decided to repurpose some of the surviving images to fill in for those damaged cards. Aces of each suit were created for the express purpose of allowing this deck to be used to play modern games. Aces would not have been present in German-Swiss decks of this type during the time period in question.
The colors chosen by the 17th Century printer are atypical. The hearts are blue rather than red. The acorns, hair, and thrones are red rather than yellow. Truly, only the leaves and some of the clothing are the correct colors. I began to refer to this deck as "The Redheads".
This project was a useful study of Renaissance playing cards and I have used this technique to restore multiple decks. Ultimately it's less satisfying that more extensive recreation techniques and I have since moved on to experimenting with woodblock and stencil prints.