Friday, June 4, 2010
I know, I know, NaNoWriMo totally derailed my posting, and then... yeah. But I refuse to let pixels make me feel guilty!
Anyway.
My sweetie and I were discussing the "perfect" tarot deck some time ago, and we hatched the brilliant plan to create one from scratch. I'm not an artist by any means, so my plan was to scour the internets for images that spoke to me, and combine them into one self-use-only tarot deck. I was pretty excited about this, and I went searching for images right away. As soon as I found one I liked, I would save it to my hard drive and move on. After doing this for, oh, an hour or two, I realized something--nearly all the images I was saving came from one tarot deck. A then-unpublished tarot deck called Shadowscapes.
Problem thus solved, I settled in to wait for Shadowscapes to be published. I just received my copy about a week ago, and I absolutely love it.
The images call to me on a very spiritual, intimate level. Taking a leave from the more Christian-based imagery of the Rider-Waite, the artist instead draws from nature and fantasy to create images based in the four elements. The deck truly speaks to my woo-woo pagan nature, down to depicting the Hierophant as a treeman and Death as a phoenix rising from her own ashes.
The natural world crawls through the deck, even nature spirits like sylphs, dryads and dragons make an appearance.
I hope to do a deck interview and post the results here... as soon as I get a quiet moment, which during the summer with two crazy kids can be a challenge! So far the deck seems to give soft answers, gentle and spiritual rather than the more person-centered Mystic Dreamer I use often. I'm very excited to do more with Shadowscapes!
Image ©Stephanie Pui-Mun Law
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