Gumi Cards: a playing card deck featuring Balinese flora and fauna

Our fourth game product is a playing card deck featuring line drawings of Balinese flora and fauna. As you play, find lotus flowers, dragonflies, squirrels, bats, banana flower blossoms and ferns representing each suit. Each Gumi Bali deck comes with a little booklet explaining the meaning behind the cards and the scientific names of all the species.

Gumi, meaning "earth" in Balinese, captures the essence of these playing cards. Each card showcases line ink drawings, hand drawn by Rumantra, a talented artist and passionate plant enthusiast based in Ubud, Bali. Rumantra's illustrations bring to life the vibrant flora and fauna of the island.

Each card was based on an original ink illustration by Rully Rumantra, seen here on display at Powder Room in Bali.

Gumi also has an accompanying coloring in book featuring all the illustrations, and hand screen-printed tote bags and t-shirts.

Rumantra x Powder Room: Afternoon Tea #003

Continuing with the third afternoon tea party, Powder Room by R4D hosted Rully from Rumantra and his Botanical Line Drawing workshop. An afternoon full of botanical fun and channeling love for plants on paper.

The afternoon tea was paired with teas by Chon Tea, including a Yabukita aracha sencha harvested this spring, blended beautifully with sakura petals that are grown surrounding the tea plantation.

Get to Know: Rumantra—illustrator, designer & plantsman

Rumantra is hard to introduce, a person with many deep loves and multiple projects always going on. People’s eyes tend to get very big once you introduce him and run through the scope of his activities. We asked our favorite multipotentialite some hard-hitting questions….

You wear so many hats, tell us about them all.

Creative Director & Owner at Rumantra, Plant Hoarder at Thousands Bloom, Loyal Servant of Toean Moeda Kanda, Teacher & Founder at Melajah Mandiri (Free Creative Entrepreneurship School for Balinese), Production & Curator at Elami & Co

What’s your favorite plant? Answer quickly!

Musa ‘Little Prince’, the tiniest banana tree in the world!

What’s a plant that everyone should know about and why?

OMG, it's a species of Pitcher plant (Nephentes rajah). It is a carnivorous plant that is able to eat not only insects, but also lizards, small mammals, and even bats! BUT BUT BUT that's not the craziest part, the craziest part is it has this (allegedly) mutual symbiosis with tree shrew, so this plant produces some sort of nectar and attracts tree shrews and when the shrew consumes it it works as a laxative that forces the shrew to poop right into the pitcher. This plant then digests it, just like a multivitamin. Nonbotanist people named this plant the toilet plant.

What do you wish you’d grown up to be?

Biologist! Go on an adventure to the Amazon rainforest, finding new species, studying plants and animals, maybe finding Eldorado?

How has your art practice changed over time?

I was the weirdo in art class back in school, never getting a good grade because my teacher said it was too weird. Then as my interest in biology developed, I got more and more interested in scientific illustration.

Drawing to me is like studying, observing, and even dissecting species of flora & fauna. Fantasizing about being a biologist in a lab but with pencils, pens, and paper instead of creepy knives and lab stuff.

How would you describe your drawing style?

It's a mix of etching, line art and decorative with a drop or two of art nouveau/deco.

Besides art and plants, what else keeps you engaged/enraged?

Animals, music, cultures & tradition, weird geeky stuff, street food and Beyonce.

And finally… what brings you joy working in the Elami team?

I mean there are no crazy new age shitty people here so that's good.

Elami just reeks of creativity which I love, so much room to experiment in creativity like for example decorating a restaurant with moss, live crickets, fish nets, lost flip flops from the beach and LIVE SNAKES!

This office also provides great snacks!