"If I Had Only Known When I Started This Deck That ......"

tarotbear

OIY!

Let me tell you ....

I am halfway through the Wands and -boy- am I sick of the sprouting leaves! I only put one set of two leaves on each Wand (Pixie put two or three on each wand) But since each leaf has a light & a dark half - times the number of wands on the card -- those little leaves seem unending!

Does anyone know- Did Pixie actually color the deck - or did Rider? No wonder Pixie bitched about ' a lot of work for little money' ...
 

JOdel

Can't help you there. But that's part of why I *hate* working in analog. Everything has to be done from scratch *every time*.

I was using commercially available 3D props, and flowering wands simply wasn't in it. Actually, apart from coins, where I did build one file and reuse and resize it endlessly, all of the staves, swords and cups vary from card to card, although most of them show up on more than one card throughout the suit.

I suppose I could have tried to build a sprouting staff and reused that. But frankly, a sprouting staff in some of the contexts that I used the staves that I did use, would have just looked a bit too "precious" (as they do in the RWS, imho). Let alone that the joins would have probably shown up from certain angles, or if the light hit them wrong.
 

tarotbear

I only put one set of two leaves on each Wand (Pixie put two or three on each wand) But since each leaf has a light & a dark half - times the number of wands on the card -- those little leaves seem unending!

I just finished the 10 Wands card - so glad they are done! I am also glad the Court cards only have one friggin' Wand each - what between highlights, lowlights, and 2-color leaves! :bugeyed:
 

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nisaba

I vaguely remember one of my decks has only one wand in each of the pip cards that is leafed, the rest aren't, which makes that one special. In the Swords pips, too, one Sword has flame running along its blade, the others don't. :)

Of course, the leafy Wand is always pointing to or doing something important.

Saves on work-time on leaves.
 

tarotbear

"WOULD I EVER PUT MYSELF THOUGH THIS MUCH (fill in the blank) AGAIN?

.... and you are all expecting me to add '....probably not!'

And my answer is:

"Probably not."

Technically - I have only designed one deck in two different versions. It arose for a reason and I followed through for that reason and I have the two versions for that reason. There was a lot of work behind-the-scenes before this deck started. First was becoming male-centric and not female-exclusive. Secondly, reimagining cards to fit that viewpoint was a challenge. Creating a central male figure for each suit instead of just putting random men in the deck was also a large consideration.

And of course - producing a colorized version of it was a bitch in itself! It has taken just about a year to reproduce the images in full color.

Unless I could find another 'artifact' - as I think Stephen King refers to it in his 'On Writing' - where you find the one thing (the 'hook') that causes you to create whatever it is - I doubt I will do another 78-card Tarot deck again. {There is a totally illegal Majors deck based on a certain movie - which I can't discuss! :p }

I am still on the wall about creating two versions of anything; however, yesterday someone contacted me because they were looking specifically for a B/W deck, so even whenever the color version is up and running I will always have the B/W version available as an option.
 

Babalon Jones

This is an interesting thread. I guess I am way different than some of you all in some ways, but exactly the same in others :)

JOdel hates working in "analog". By that, I guess you mean, on paper/canvas/real Malkuth material world substance, as in, not digital. Correct me if I'm wrong in what you meant by analog. I so prefer working with mundane world old school art materials. I love paint and ink and brushes and markers and papers. I do geometrical shit with a compass and ruler and have all sorts of cool phi rulers and stuff. I reverse shit with a window, hahaha though I know a computer does it perfect and that is like 14th century. While the process is indeed incredibly time consuming, and frustrating, I still like it. I don't like the 'puter as much, though there are some things I like about that too. And there is something about the look of what you call "analog" that I like so much better than digital images. It is like when in Islamic art for a rug they build in a mistake purposely to let God in. Except I don't need to do it purposely haha.

The bad part is, as you say, take so much time. And unforgiving. Make a mistake - start over. No "undo" button. Especially my current deck project. It is drawn on frosted mylar with pencil then a permanent marker then painted with india ink. Then, more marker to enhance outlines. Then, scan etc. So, step one is the pencil sketch, well, fine, work shit out but do not overwork it or you will damage the mylar. Then go over the pencil with permanent marker. DO NOT MAKE A MISTAKE AT THIS POINT, THERE ARE NO DO OVERS. So, HOLD YOUR FRICKIN" BREATH and do not move while you make that permanent line. Over and over and over. Then, erase the pencil. If you effed up step one too many times and overworked it and have to erase too hard, guess what: you just made it so the colored ink does not want to stick to the mylar since you damaged it. To correct pool up layers of ink, baby. Takes time.

But, I prefer that than to working in digital. Not that I *can't* do digital; I'm not a dinosaur exactly. Unless you are a Millennial in which case everyone else is one :). I taught myself, with freeware (Gimp) to do the basics. Digital art just feels, and to me looks, sterile.

I take my original scans and only tweak them the bare minimum for printing (scan, resize, crop, take out the cat/dog hair on the scan, haha, convert files to what printers want, add bleed, etc, for the most part). I know how to do what ever else is needed, or I can figure it out in a pinch.

And then Tarotbear, I hear you saying you are starting with your black and white deck, and coloring it, and how much you dislike that process. To me, that is the best part, in a way. For me, getting the idea down in pencil is the hardest part. Getting what is in my head on paper is so hard. Then, drawing the permanent ink lines over the pencil is stressful as that is the "no mistakes part". But once that is done, I rather enjoy getting out my paintbrush and painting the image in with ink. Though my partner will tell you, there comes a point about 80% into the process where I agonize over the color choices, and despair and wonder if I "ruined it", and then when there is *one* more color to paint in, I can agonize over it so bad, as that last color is like The Dude's rug, that ties the whole room together :)

It does not help that I am trying to follow the Golden Dawn color scales for each card. Or maybe it does, lol, not sure.

What I "wish I had known when starting this deck" is, how long it takes to get to a finished deck from the art completion to when it is truly done! I finished the Majors in mid June and here it is late August. Had to copyright and get print quotes and box quotes and samples. Just sent print files to printer. Had to turn raw scans into cropped files, make a card back, add borders and titles, make a box design, make dies for the box, make dies for the foils, turn into pdfs etc etc and on and on. Once I get the boxes, must stain and add the liners. Once I get the cards, have to add my special handmade packaging touches and sign the signature cards. Have to make images for the web, take pics to capture the foil, take pics of the finished boxes, set up the pics on a website, make a web store if you are gonna sell them. Write a LWB or a full sized book! Takes so much time...
 

JOdel

Yup. Old-style art materials=analog. Analog vs. digital.

And you don't need to tell me about the frosted mylar. *Great* for doing ink drawings. Particularly things like india ink with pen drawings. Not bad for colored pencil either. Never tried using paint on it since paint and I never really got on.

Actually, what I did was to do the basic pencil sketching on a separate piece of white paper and trace that onto the mylar. (Eliminates the erasing step.) One of my canceled projects back years ago was an heraldic coloring book for my local SCA kingdom. I built a nice template of the shield with the standard divisions all laid out and did a film positive of it and used that as the bottom layer, did the design elements on good tracing vellum, taped the mylar onto the top of those (could still see the underlying template through both layers), and then started inking with rapidograph and crow quills. Fortunately the end product was *supposed* to be solid linework which the end user would do the coloring of.

But the really big downside with working in analog is always going to be getting what you've got onto the printed card. These days that means taking it digital. In the bad old days that was done with building separations for a press, for *every* card, and that was a nasty, fiddly piece of work which just about never came out looking as well as the original.

These days, it usually just means scanning and cleaning up the scan in Photoshop. Even there, you lose data in the scanning process. Although I don't think it is anywhere near as bad as moving film, especially old film, to scan. You can see the degradation of the image when you scan a photograph (or worse, a slide), and only if you scanned at vastly higher than needed resolution were you sometimes able to correct it to the degree it needed in order to get it back to where you started. And then you often needed to reduce resolution for wherever the image was being submitted. (Digital photography comes with a much wider gamut of usable data.)

I do much better in digital. (Bert Monroy is my hero.) But even so I don't think I'd undertake to do a full deck using only Photoshop and illustrator. It would certainly be possible, and I gather that a number of other people have done it. For that matter, Corel's Painter would probably be an outstanding tool for someone who wants the tidiness of digital with the feel of analog materials. You can simulate amazingly similar brush actions in Painter with a tablet and stylus (and a clear understanding of how to program the brush behaviour). Photoshop's brush engine is vastly improved from its origins (thank Monroy, among others), but Painter is still the go-to for analog simulations.

I'm only now in retirement getting some formal art training, and I'm aware of my limits. For that matter, the medium in which I built my deck ONLY exists in digital format, since I was using low-end 3D software to build the scenes, and then took the renders into Photoshop to build the cards.
 

tarotbear

And then Tarotbear, I hear you saying you are starting with your black and white deck, and coloring it, and how much you dislike that process...

Thank you for joining in! So far it's only been JOdel and me! I was expecting a lot more input from everyone on AT who has produced a deck, but I guess I was mistook in that regard ...

I dislike it because 'there has to be a better way'; I have compared MS PAINT as trying to duplicate the Sistine Chapel Ceiling with a Q-Tip. Unfortunately, all I have is MS Paint and changing to GIMP or something now means the possibility that things won't match. (I really do wish PAINT had layers - I've done some cool skies but without a layer, trying to get cloud shading to show through 10 Wands is a PIA!)

I won't deny that the colorization changes the cards dramatically - but they were designed and drawn as non-colored images and as such they have a certain power unto themselves because they don't have a dramatic storm sky in the background to reinforce the image.
 

Babalon Jones

I dislike it because 'there has to be a better way'; I have compared MS PAINT as trying to duplicate the Sistine Chapel Ceiling with a Q-Tip. Unfortunately, all I have is MS Paint and changing to GIMP or something now means the possibility that things won't match. (I really do wish PAINT had layers - I've done some cool skies but without a layer, trying to get cloud shading to show through 10 Wands is a PIA!)

LOL and I thought I was old school :) MS PAINT yeah that is a Qtip. Seriously, at least try to match in GIMP, you may be able to and it is FREE and has layers! It is not hard to learn, I mean, the first few times I swore like a plumber pirate, but I do that anyway!


I agree how the coloring changes the cards dramatically, as mine too were designed as non-colored images by default, being drawn with what is basically a fine line Sharpie. I want to do a black and white pre-colored version just because I like the way they look that way as much as colored.
 

tarotbear

LOL and I thought I was old school :) I agree how the coloring changes the cards dramatically, as mine too were designed as non-colored images by default, being drawn with what is basically a fine line Sharpie.

I did mine with a Papermate(C) 'Flair' medium point! On copier paper! (used white-out for mistakes.) Then I erased the pencil lines ...

I had bought a bottle of India Ink (or what passes as same these days) and have several steel nibs but that was too much work for me.