Hello Major Tom
Your use of color for Marseilles is actually quite fun and I like it's clarity.
The masculine figures show your strength and I believe are close to what you want to show. When you use classic costume with modern touches, it shows both a traditional nod and modernized taste.
But I would choose one or the other for the majors: old fashioned costumes with updated touches or accents or newer figures with a touch of the old emblems or standards. Do you want your feminine figures to be slinky and long or staid and humerous? Just a thought about questions people think about for their cards.
Feminine and childish figures can be challenging. Because it can be hard to do perspective and to do an idealized proportion on what we envision as feminine form, perhaps the costuming you might choose would be a little more flowing and classic. That might help with the full feminine figures with microscopic shoes and shortened legs, because the perspective distortion is sometimes distracting for us old-style collectors.
May I suggest that it's the omission that give delicacy to read as childish or feminine: The eyes will have detail, not much detail in the brows or nose, a small line or two for the chin and suggestion of color for the mouth read as feminine. The bold line for masculine figures with equal emphasis on all features isn't the same.
To be honest, yes, old style decks have distortions and not all the fine engravings look very good...I have hopes that you do not mind to look at some of what I consider these crude examples and perhaps maybe the iconography and look of the feminine forms might be of interest to you
http://translate.google.com/transla...ot+de+gumppenberg&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Please click on the links to his discussion of the different cards or 'Triumphs' note on the bottom of the page-- I tried to link to the exact card pages and came up only with the first page. I was trying to come up with a Marseilles page where some of the cards were halfway between fine engraving and somewhat crude...but this is my preference and my way of doing tarot drawings and such can be too closely involved with looking at traditional examples. If you are breaking free and just using a similar color palette...my commentary might not be what you are looking for now.
You have a fun, friendly style and sometimes that is all that counts for carrying your project forward.
Take care and best wishes on your evolving project!
Mari H.