Vintage Las Vegas Poker Chips: A New Illustration Collection

Jul 6

I have a habit of wandering into obscure corners of design history. This month's rabbit hole? Vintage Las Vegas poker chips.

I found myself comparing poker chips from casinos that disappeared decades ago and saying things out loud like, "Look at this ridiculous little cowboy!" If anyone had been standing behind me, they probably would have backed slowly out of the room.

The More I Looked...

The funny thing is that every one of these chips is real. I'm not inventing these characters or logos. Somewhere, at some point in Las Vegas history, a group of adults sat around a table, looked at a sketch of a smoking cowboy, and collectively decided, "Yes. That's exactly what represents our casino."

Honestly, they weren't wrong.

Some casinos went with horseshoes. Others featured portraits, buildings, lucky sevens, or typography bold enough to practically yell at you across a blackjack table. Every chip was trying to convince you that their casino was where luck lived, and apparently there was no rulebook for how to accomplish that.

That's part of what makes them so much fun.

From Casino Tables to My Drawing Table

I've been redrawing each chip in my own illustration style, not because I'm trying to make museum-quality reproductions, but because I want to capture the personality of the originals.

Some make me laugh. Some make me appreciate just how much character designers managed to squeeze into something barely larger than a silver dollar. And every time I think I've found the weirdest one, another chip shows up and says, "Hold my whiskey."

So...What Am I Making?

That's actually the fun part.

I don't know yet.

Right now, I'm simply exploring. As the collection grows, I've started arranging the illustrations into repeat patterns just to see what happens. Maybe they'll become fabric. Maybe zipper pouches. Maybe stationery. Maybe something I haven't even thought of yet.

Not every project starts with a finished vision. Sometimes it starts with a ridiculous little cowboy on a poker chip, and you just follow wherever that leads.