The Magician/Baba Yaga
Card number 2, yay! I settled on Baba Yaga for the magician for lots of reasons. The magic, sure; also, she’s this really layered two sided character who in some stories is evil and murderous and eats children, and in others helpful and mischievous and wise. For her symbols of the four elements, I have a bowl of water for. . . well, water, duh; a pomegranate for earth; a knife for air; and a firebird feather for, you guessed it, fire. I also worked in a snake piting its own tail as part of the embroidery on her jacket, and there are fruits and flowers all over her embroidery and the trees behind her. I was really pushed there – I originally wanted hanging flowers and vines behind her, but everything else was so rooted in the taiga that moving the trees elsewhere seemed like mixing my themes. Sooooo I may have painted holly berries onto what really doesn’t look like a holly tree, but at least they’re both evergreens and fuck it, she’s magic, she does what she wants.
Have you noticed that the first two cards are usually male and mine aren’t? Expect that to continue; this is likely to be a female and androgynous deck. A. I don’t much care about the fairytales featuring men, and even if I do use some, I will likely gender swap the characters, and B. I don’t really love drawing men either. Also I don’t want to tell you who my lovers are yet but I have them planned and it is going to be queer for sure.
Anyway, business stuff. No second printing for the Neurotic Owl tarot, I have not heard from anyone that it’s needed so I’m perfectly happy to go back to being happily sold out. The Alleyman’s Tarot continues to kick ass and I am DELIGHTED. There have been a few questions popping up about whether artists are being compensated sufficiently and let me just say YES. I was perfectly happy with my original contract with Seven – they upped the amount I thought licensing my card was worth – and every other stretch goal has included an extra $200 to every artist, which is WILD. I think we’re sitting at $600 extra apiece right now for non-exclusive use of one piece or art so yeah, no problems here. In fact I’m planning to get a better scanner with part of my payout so that I can finally get accurate reproductions of my work. Y’all have no idea how much I have to dick around with color in photoshop because my home scanner doesn’t pick up pale colors, the big scanner at work doesn’t read them accurately, and photographing instead of scanning is just a whole fun raft of nightmares. Photographing is what I’m doing for now because my home scanner just can’t be trusted at all for watercolor, and I’m still spending a ton of time skewing corners a tiny tiny bit at a time to get back to the actual image I painted.
I’m going to start posting these painted cards to Redbubble and Teepublic as usual if folks want prints or stickers or whatnot. I’m making sure to get a clear scan of the black and whites too – assuming I finish the deck (increasingly likely) 78 images is plenty for another coloring book.
Neurotic Owl 