Tarot again?
Two bits of tarot news, in fact. First, if you haven’t seen my Facebook posts or tweets, The Alleyman’s Tarot Kickstarter is up and running! It’s a really cool project, and Seven, who put it together, has done amazing work. They reached out to me a while ago to license the Empress card from my deck for this one – the whole deck is unique cards chosen from tons of different artists, and it includes a number of duplicate cards in different interpretations – nine death cards alone! So do go take a look, the art is wild and weird and very intriguing.
In related news, looking at all those different art cards plus a recent impromptu mini-lecture I messaged to friends (never get me started on the young girl’s journey-quest in fairytales and folklore) got my juices flowing and all of a sudden this morning I felt the burning desire to design ANOTHER tarot deck. Not to actually produce probably, though I’ll certainly use the art on Redbubble – I’d have to kickstart AGAIN to get printing costs and that’s no small project. But I want to draaaaawwww it is all. So a’drawing I shall go. Do. Thing. It’s been a long week, wording is hard.
As you might guess, I want to pull from fairytales and folktales and make this a much looser project than the first one, where I followed the Rider-Waite symbols pretty closely. This’ll be more about finding the right characters and moments for the meanings of the cards, which since these stories are all about layers and transformation and knowledge should be incredibly fun. The hard part will be picking one reference per card!
I’m going in order again, so here’s the line drawing for Little Red Riding Hood as The Fool. She’s not just blithely picking flowers oblivious to the danger approaching, she’s at the start of a journey from innocence to knowledge, safety to peril to safety again. She’s going into the woods a child and coming out closer to adulthood (thanks Sondheim for making the subtext text). She’s perfect to get things going.
Also, she’s cute and I love a wolf.
Neurotic Owl 
LOVE.
(My last name is Wolf.)
(Which explains the madonna as wolf in my avatar.)
I’m not savvy about how to tap in, but understand there is an avid Big-Bad-Wolf-Little-Red-Riding-Hood market (Humpty Dumpty as well).