First bumps in the road, hit hard... (Tarot of the beckoning night)

Okay so I have been going forward with a vengeance with creating my Tarot deck up to last weekend. Being somewhat more limited regarding time this week is a drawback but that's no biggy. My first color try outs however got me down, hard. I have no clue what to do regarding technique and scheme. Every ouch of color seems to bring down the original design. I have done a few variations and the less color I use, the better it feels. But I was not planning on a deck in grayscale and color is actually important to the cards meaning.

I am even contemplating looking for someone else to do the coloring....

I have got some heavy thinking to do and apparently I was ill equipped for disappointment here, my ego got me thinking this was gonna be easy. Anyway, here are the color try outs, feedback it to hell if you want it's not likely to make it to the final versions anyway.

2 color version

color one-on-one scan

some color editing

the original

slightly enhanced color

My project: Tarot of the beckoning night

So here's this thing I am working on, a Tarot deck. I have been planning on doing something like this for a long time and have even started on it a few times. Now I am actually going through with it. At the moment I have seven cards ready and my head is spilling with ideas for the rest of them. There are however a lot of choices yet to be made.

Am I going to do color, I think so but I am not yet sure how. I am planning to make specific drawings for all 78 cards, not just the greater arcana, but that is a massive amount of work, am I up for that? I am also trying to figure out how much of my own ideas I can put in, Tarot comes from a centuries old tradition, which symbols, which specific meanings am I going to out in, will it be accessible for all readers, beginners and veterans alike. And then there is the fact that some imagery might even be age restricted like the Devil.
Whatever outcome these questions may have there is also the actual getting the whole thing printed and if possible distributed. Right now I am thinking of pushing the black and white greater arcana forward and do a few cheap ass printouts and see if I can get a few people to review them in use and spread the word.

I will be using this page and my facebook artist page to promote the thing and get feedback, so keep an eye out for that. www.facebook.com/MayTheMoonLightYourPath

Now to find time between work, diabetus induced couchcoma and xbox to keep up my two-designs-a-day commitment.

Death

the Tower

the Hanged Man

the High Priestess

the Devil

the Hermit

the Fool

Halloween holier than Christmas

Today is Halloween, this being the Netherlands that’s not saying much. Oh sure, some shops at the mall decorate in orange and black and some of the shop’s personnel actually do put on something of a costume, but other than that it’s basically watching the Halloween episodes of well known American t.v. series.  So no trick or treating or company “who’s got the sluttiest outfit contest” here. Samhain and Dia de los Muertos are next to unknown for anything other than plot devices in horror movies and I believe 90% of the world has lost most if not all religious significance to all hallows eve. At least consciously.

I love Halloween and all the related celebrations because subconsciously it manages to at least confront us with that little bit of spirituality most uf us do have, fear of dying and the unknown. And nothing pushes people towards spirituality more than fear of the hereafter. Christmas may have been a spiritual celebration once, but it’s nothing of the sort for most of us having our minds occupied by family- or company get-togethers and returnable gifts. Now Halloween and it’s sibling celebrations like dia de los muertos, with all it’s commercial success, confronts us with, ghosts, zombies and other dead and undead, forcing us to think about our mortality and therefore… what comes next. Watching skeletons, sugar skulls and gravestones fill the landscape seems to be yelling at us, you’ll die one day, better be ready!

So when you’re bobbing for apples, out trick or treating or flirting with your boss in that skintight naughty cat outfit, in the back of your head you are busy contemplating your demise and how you fair on Anubis’ scales. I’ll bet Christmass, Easter and many other holy-days are jealous as hell of that.