Silhouettes Tarot / Silhouettes Tarot Negative

Tanga said:

My Word - well - I never heard of it until this thread - checked it out - loved it - and have just bought it.
Will give you an update when it's arrived. (fingers crossed for no dramas).

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I've ordered mine recently and had no issues with the card stock or anything, so I'm sure your deck will be fine.

I hope you enjoy it!

Serenia said:

Concerning the quality of the cards, I'm a bit surprised that nobody has mentioned MASA September's cardstock update yet: in July I received an e-mail from him (and I assume he contacted all buyers of a 2nd edition deck) where he offered a replacement deck free of charge on premium quality cardstock. As I understand his e-mail, this applies to regular or signed 2nd edition decks delivered before April 1st.

I received mine today, but haven't had the time yet to unwrap it. If anyone is interested, I can try to describe the difference between the old and the new cardstock once I have opened my new deck.

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I too received a new deck free of charge, and I examined it side-by-side with the original deck. Since I am a collector and not a reader, I had not handled the original cards very much, but I did notice scuffs and scratches on the card faces. The new deck appears to have a better finish on it. I appreciate MASA September taking this step and I hope all who are dissatisfied can get a replacement.

Felicity

So I emailed Masa September and he sent me a replacement deck, no box, no book just the deck. Is awesome and I am pleased. Still came with a slight bend though.

This is on my wish list now. I saw this awhile back but it didn't call to me. But this time around I feel differently

O.O I love you people. I would never have thought to check the artist site again.
I wanted this badly when it first came out, but just couldn't. Now, I think I like this one EVEN BETTER -- much like I have my borderless Deviant Moon. It is oooonnnn its waaaaayyy tooooo meeeeee!!

My list of decks that I'd love to buy is long, in reverse proportion (is that the right word?) to my tarot budget. My love for Lotte Reiniger animated films and for the whole silhouette tradition, including folk art paper cuts, finally got the better of me. If the deck is too cute, I'll have to live with that - I bought it.

I have this deck... I purchased mine awhile back. I love mine. No problems at all with it. the deck author seems to be on the ball with helping any problems that have arisen.

Be aware the author has a pretty hard core spam filter. I shot off a quick one liner with the info requested and it bounced, which scared me a bit -- a bit of google translate cued me in to the spam issue.

After crafting a more extensive missive I got a prompt reply from him/her I am so looking forward to playing with this! I've been on kinda a historical deck roll for a bit, so this will be DIFFERENT.

I've been stalking the post lady lately - and today I was lucky, I came in just when it arrived. A nice, neat parcel, with a light blue organza bag and a twice shrink-wrapped deck in glowing colours. Borderless, lovely, the cardstock is a bit too perfect for my taste - very smooth - but makes a good impression. If the cards are too slippery, well I guess I'll just have to use them ;-)

I'm happy I bought it. I noticed when I looked for place for the Silhouettes in my tarot boxes that a sub-collection of "naive" decks developed - the Badger's Forest, Inner Child, Dreaming Way, Sulamit Wülfing, Anna K. and now this beauty. It's logical. I'm an art historian but I was an art educator before, and I have a deep love for children book illustrations. I think it's an under-estimated art. I believe that children should be fed only on the best - in food, feelings, and quality toys and materials, including of course books.

I grew up on very few but very good children's films, among them Lotte Reiniger's silhouette fairy tales (which were of course very old already when I was a child), and my children saw them too as children.

I feel that the Silhouettes tarot stands in this long tradition of excellent art that speaks to young eyes easily - and to adults, too, on a different level.

I also love the Jewish folk art of paper cuts. I had the privilege to meet a very talented woman who made wonderful traditional paper cuts with a twist. If you have never seen a Jewish paper cut, you may wish to google it - they're lovely.

And the art of silhouette portraits, cultivated in Europe of the 18th and 19th century, is dear to my heart, too.

So this deck touches my interests in different places. I'm very happy I bought it and will explore it to the full

I've had it for two months now and it's one of the decks i reach for regularly - the other one (except for my eternal Thoth) that I keep close is the Dreaming Way. These two really surprised me.

The Silhouettes Tarot reads very well for me. I find the color choices very good even when they're unexpected. Purple for the Swords suit - when so many decks use yellow, the complementary colour. In the Aristotelian tradition, Air is described as hot and moist, and the association with heat and lightness probably gave birth to the use of yellow for air and accordingly also to the Swords Suit. And yet, the cool purple Masa September chose is beautiful, expressive, noble and like a cool, fresh wind.

The figurines are indeed cute and have exaggerated proportions, and they do look like dolls - like the mechanical dolls in the movies by Reiniger I mentioned already.

Explanation of Reiniger's silhouette technique https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvU55CUw5Ck

But they have something uncanny or even sinister. My very sensitive daughter feels these cards are creepy. Mechanical dolls - I remember the wonderful but creepy stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann.... and I love the deck even more.

Somewhere between uncanny valley and whimsy village these figures balance, jump and play. In a spread, they look like movie stills. The vividly coloured backgrounds give a strong atmosphere, and the black silhouetted figures (more or less all in the same scale, size and proportion) seem to move in and out of their cards.

Getting into a reading with these cards is easy, there is so much energy in the scenes and figures. The interlocking negative-positive spaces are so sophisticated, it's a joy to watch and the eyes find different ways of interpreting the images. Like others, I found that sometimes I can't decide which is negative and which is positive space - like the famous optical illusions with vases vs faces. This is a lovely effect.

All my readings, for myself and others, have been precise and easy to interpret. There is simply a beautiful flow to this borderless tarot.

I blackened the edges which gave it an additional visual cohesiveness.

I hesitated to buy the deck because I was afraid that an overload of cute would kill my intuition; cuteness is not something I look for in a tarot deck. But I'm glad I bought it. Nice cardstock too - although I'm really not picky about cardstock and accept nearly everything.