Int'l. Icon Tarot :: all Wand cards available to see --

You must have fixed it as I had no trouble at all. These cards are all very polished and proffessional. The choice of colours is really quite subtle and there is a level of detail in them that is quite deceptive given the smoothly cut out shapes.

I think some work better than others. The devil card with the clearly male and female figures is great. The 4 of wands captures the meaning of the card well but the composition looks just a bit cluttered and off balance.

I found the whole deck very interesting, in parts it looks like a surreal public information card (in case of emergencies please jump of a cliff with a small dog). I guess its the little footless 'symbol' people that just put me in mind of those kinds of official signs. The more complex pictures seem more lie illustration for some very complex children's fairytale book.

I would be interested in knowing what you were going for.

Hi, back again. I think the simplest cards work the best -- like the page of wands, and the 10 of Wands. There is a perculiar tension between the realistic rendering of the anaomty and the cropped body/round head symbolicness... With the empress I think the cat is a bit jaggy -- seems to be in a different more fully stylised form -- c.f the fool's dog.

"... in parts it looks like a surreal public information card (in case of emergencies please jump of a cliff with a small dog). I guess its the little footless 'symbol' people that just put me in mind of those kinds of official signs. "
"...I think the simplest cards work the best -- like the page of wands, and the 10 of Wands. There is a perculiar tension between the realistic rendering of the anonymity and the cropped body/round head symbolicness..."

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You've put your finger on the narrow edge I'm trying to walk with these designs. The footless, round-headed figures are indeed borrowed from 'official signs' (hence the title 'International Icon Tarot'. (Think of the pedestrian crossing signs, the icons on restroom doors, the in-case-of-water-landing folders... these figures, which are international and transcend language, are everywhere.) The idea is that the Tarot is a sort of road map to the soul, or a set of signs for soul travel, and this deck tries to draw a parallel between international signage and the Tarot. They're similar in several ways.
The question becomes: how simplified can the image be made? It must contain all the shades of meaning we expect, yet at the same time retain the stylistic flavor of road signs and airport notices.
The figures in standard Tarot cards carry certain emotions. If I remove the hands, the feet and the facial features, all that's left is an outline and body posture. These figures have to be accurate enough to express the necessary emotion (or non-emotion, or ambiguous emotion, as the case may be), and yet remain as simply rendered as the cutouts on restroom doors.
This is the artistic challenge that has kept me interested.
Now that they're pretty much a complete set, I'm interested in finding out whether other people understand them. Maybe people think they're TOO simple, or maybe people think they're TOO complicated. I need to know, so I can adjust them as needed.