Thanks for the link Krimsa.

A couple months ago I bought some drawing supplies and I got a book then that speaks to this issue of drawing from the right side of the brain. And, yes, they had exercises where you draw things upside down to avoid seeing the actual picture. The idea is to just draw lines and shapes and what you see, rather than to attempt to logically reproduce someting.

It is a good method and helped me a lot too.

Yeah. I find I do in fact go into that weird "R- Brain" mode. Its almost a little creepy. Your sense of time changes also. I guess people who are naturally artistic like JB and so forth can just naturally harness that. I certainly cant and had to rely on the exercises in that book.

Another trick in that book was to stare at all the little lines in your palm for a few minutes and that will induce the R-Brain mode.

I'm working on drawing up a new deck of tarot cards. Although I haven't done a lot of work on them lately.

Here is the very crude brainstorming drawing I did for the first card, "The Fool".



I did some of this in PC Paint, and some of it by hand with color pencils and then scanned in those drawings and added them.

I didn't draw the baby or the dog. I stole those from the Internet just for ideas. But I do want the Fool to be a baby. Owl draw my own before I'm completely done. I want the entire thing to be my own painting.

In fact, I'll do the entire card by hand. I was just using PC Paint to brainstorm the layout.

For example, I drew the vines by hand that will be used for the border. They actually have much more detail in the actual painting which is an 8" x 10" size. The leaves and flowers have a lot more detail than can be seen in the picture above. If you look close you can see a green snake in the vine, it's tail is at the top of the vine and it's head is sticking out to the side. The right and left vines are identical but reversed.

Just above the vine on the left hand side you can see a little figure, that's going to be a faerie. She's pouring pentacle coins from a gold pot. They get larger and larger as they fall to earth. They don't necessarily represent money, just the material world.

The green in this quadrant of the card represents plant life. I'd like to draw that up like a jungle of sorts.

At the top of the jungle on the horizion is the World Tree. I want to draw that better too.

Above that is the Sun with fiery wands being shot off of it like solar flares. This is of course the element Fire.

Then a face in a cloud blowing the wind represent Air. Instead of swords owl be using Quills. Feathery pens. These will represent intelligence, logos, reason, and communication. They replace the suit of Swords. I kind of think of Quills as the suit of Words. The feathery pens are floating around in the wind like birds.

The final quandrant is the element Water. There are cups of love floating in the sea, along with a sailing ship that represents the voyage of our emotions.

I'm really just working on designing this border. Every card in the deck will have this same border. The individual meaning of each card will be show in the picture that sits within the vine archway.

78 cards to go!

Well, actaully I'm focusing on this border first, and once that's finished that will be the boarder for all the cards in the deck. Then I can just focus on painting the scenes for each individual tarot card.

I expect this to take several years to complete. It's just a hobby, not a business, so there's no rush.

Cool. I like all the details and that every little aspect has meaning. Very nice. Yeah that will take a while but its something you can do in your spare time. Like you say, no rush.

Thank you. I don't do a lot of painting and drawing but I really should do a lot more.



They are quite interesting. I need to start drawing humans. I think I shy away from that having just decided that I can't do it. But that's just a mental block I need to get over.



I've started a Book of Shawdows in word processor documents. Like the Songs of the Goddess and God. And a few meditations and chants. Then owl transfer this over to a genuine Book.

I actualy already bought a nice Hard Cover Book with blank pages to write in. And my sister bought me caligraphy pens that owl use. Writing the actual Book of Shadows will be like creating a work of art. It will be a form of meditation in its own right. A ritual, and tribute to the gods.

I hope to write a new Book of Shadows every year. I will not throw the old ones away. I might publish them as they will in a very real sense become spiritually inspired doctrines of sorts. Not the word of God by any means, but certainly the expressions and spiritual feelings of a human being.

The Book of Shadows will also contain my Circle Casting Rituals in some depth. It supposed to be like an instruction book of sorts. It may be used as food for thought for others. Just a spiritual example to give them inspirtation. Certainly not meant to be used as hardcore dogma.

The other thing that both Scott and Christopher are big on is a daily diary or journal. That is more personal. I can see destroying those after they have served their purpose.

Christopher suggests writing three pages a day. Everyday, maybe a page, morning, noon and night. Or in one sitting.

The idea being that you should record all your thoughts because even though they may seem trivial at the time, they may be very insightful later.

Like those weird dreams I had of the Goddess in a cave, the witch at the cauldron who was kind of representative of my loving kind mother, and the God who kept hitting me over the head with bloodly leg of an animal. Maybe to show me that blood and death isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Who knows?

The dream may have seem irreverent to some, but I think it was some type of communique from the subconscious mind.

It wasn't a bad dream at all. I actually viewed the God to be very friendly even though he kept hitting me with this bloody leg. It was more like he liked me and was doing this for some reason that would actually benefit me.

He also kind of reminded me of a particular uncle I had who was kind of like my dad in a way since my own father had died when I was young.

Fortunately I recorded that dream just to post it here, then I saved it for my journal.

That's the kind of thing that goes in the journal, not the Book of Shadows. And that's also the kind of thing that can be tossed aside once it's significance has been understood. It served its purpose at that point and is no longer useful.

Everything I do, including all this artwork is part of that journal experience.

Darla and me have just started back work on our new tarot deck and we have less than 25 cards left to finish out of 80. We are so excited! Some of the designs that we discarded are still great designs and I am going to make them into paintings.

Creating the "perfect" tarot deck has always been Darla's dream. ('Perfect' according to her standards anyway.) She has over 30 tarot decks and she has forgot more about the tarot than I know.

Anyway between caring for my parents and aunt, painting those movie star paintings for a local restaurant, and helping Darla finish the designs, I am up by 7:00 a.m. and don't get to bed till after 12:00.

But we are sure getting excited. We can actually see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I can't wait to print out our first decks and start using (and selling) them!

That is so exciting! I can't wait to be one the first to purchase your new deck!

Great! Thanks!

Here is one of our rejected designs. I am going to just paint it in my style since we are not going to use it for the six of cups. I like it, but Darla found something better. We are using old masters art to make our designs. We are not painting them but putting them together with our computer graphic programs.

This is our current (old) six of cups that we can't use in our new deck because of copyright problems. We made our first deck just for our own use and for fun, not for sale.

I really like that 6 of cups with the boy holding out the cup for the little girl. It's hard to imagine a better design that than.

Like you say, there is no perfect deck. Everyone has their own tastes.

I like the brown antique colors in that card. My Fool card has really simple colors in it almost cartoonish looking.

However by the final design I'm hoping to have very earthy colors and texture and more or a Michael Angelo or Leonardo Divinci look to it.

The Fool card I posted is just in the prototype brainstroming mode. Almost like a sketch. When I start in with the real card everything will be hand painted and hopefully very rich and professional looking. Also, since the border will be an overlay, I'll be able to rework the border as I paint all the other scenes for the individual cards. So by the time the deck is truly finished the border should be quite rich looking. I hope.

I know. When Darla told me she had a new design she liked better I could not believe her. I don't know if her new design is better or not, but she liked it better. I liked both of them about the same. But she has final say on the designs because she is the one who had the dream to create the perfect deck and I just want her to be happy so we can get it done.




Well hand painting each card is going to be a huge project. You will be an expert by the time your are done.

That's the whole idea.

I think I'm more interested in the project itself than I am with the final product.

It's probably going to have a 'leap frog' affect as well. If I paint the first card this year, and finish the last card 3 years down the road, I'm sure I'll want to redo the first one by then.

Actually I think the way I'm going to go about it is to work on all 78 cards simultaneously. By that I mean I'll probably sketch them all out, then go back and maybe start doing the backgrounds on all of them, and then go back and add more details to all of them, etc.

That way the whole deck will kind of evolve simultaneously.

I'm also starting with water colors, but there may come a time when I cross over to oil paints.

So what I very well may end up with is an original watercolor deck, and then a more detailed oil-painted one.

In fact, I was even thinking of maybe starting with a 'cartoonish' style deck (very similar to my original prototype card) and finish that deck first, then maybe move on to redoing it in more detail since I will have learned better skills by then.

I've noticed that many tarot decks are 'cartoonish' in flavor. In fact, the most popular Rider Waite deck is kind of cartoonish.


http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/rider-waite/

The Llewellyn deck is a bit more richer looking.

http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/llewellyn/

If I can learn to paint like the Llewellyn deck owl be thrilled.

I like the Llewellyn deck a lot actually.

The Mystic Faerie Tarot is another deck I have that I really like.

http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/mystic-faerie/

Mystic Faerie seems to be about half-way between the Rider Waite and the Llewellyn decks. More cartoonish than Llewellyn but more detailed than Rider Waite.

I'm attracted to the 'child-like' visions and art. Spiritaulity is about getting in touch with your inner child I think. (A return to innocence)

I also like the 'fantasy' feel it helps to incite my psyche.

Your cards are very 'realistic', yet they also have an air of fantasy about them just in the richness and period-flavors the scenes.

I like that too. Let me know when your deck is published, owl buy one too.

Okay, I will let you all know when the deck is finished. I don't know how long it will take the printer to produce them, I hope they are fast.

Yes the cards are very realistic. I thank God we decided that I did not have to hand paint all the designs. Darla and me would never had gotten through that. She is too picky and she would have drove me insane before we got half way through the deck. These are old masters, and they spent months on each painting. I was trying to get them done in two weeks and match their quality. That was impossible I soon discovered. I'm just not that good. (or that fast..)

And anyway that's not my style of painting. I would have had to quit doing my own work in my own style and spend two years of my life trying to outdo the old masters.

I was so glad we decided to finish them on the computer and forget about painting them by hand. That way we can change the designs anytime we want. (I was trying to get the paintings done, and Darla was changing her mind on the designs and driving me nuts.)

Organizers of the Miss Toronto Tourism pageant for 2008 invited Stephanie Conover, 23, (Miss Canada Plus 2007) to be one of their judges. In an unusual show of religious bigotry, they later decided that she was unfit to serve as a judge because of her hobbies. Director of the Miss Toronto Tourism pageant notes that hers is a private organization, receives no government funds and thus can discriminate on any grounds that they wish. Public reaction to their decision was intensely negative.

Ms Connors is the first known beauty queen who is openly Neopagan .

Hmmmrmmmm That seems so uncharacteristically Canadian to exhibit such intolerance. In the US I would have not have batted an eye of course but Canada?



Ms. Conover's reaction to the rejection:

Ms. Conover said that she was stunned by the letter. The Toronto Star reported:

"I was fuming. They said tarot cards are the occult and that I use them to commune with dark forces,' which she insisted is not the case. 'They're completely benign. I use them for healing, to give guidance. You can buy tarot cards at Chapters or the CNE'."

Damn! If I were her I would sue them for slander. That is how some of the people in my town view me. That really ticks me off. What a bunch of saps.

But if they are independent an 'Christian' organization or predominately Christian I can understand their right to do that. The key is that they don't receive any government funding. Its more like a private club.

Right. As irritating and discriminatory as it appears on the surface, legally they have a right to do that and that is why they did. Sadly, she would have been better off lying and stating she was a Christian as that is what they wanted to hear. If she has said on the form she was Agnostic or an Atheist, chances are they would have rejected her also. They wanted a "nice down to earth girl" and not a raging lunatic who is summoning the dark forces of the earth with her Tarot Cards and sacrificing small animals as "hobbies."

Interesting. Perhaps if they want a Miss Canada who is of a particular relgion they should put that requirement out there before people enter. I am surprised this happend in Canada as well.

I think they just didn't want her to be a judge because they were afraid she would be biased in her selection of a winner and unfairly prejudicial towards Christian contestants.

That would have made a good topic in the general religion forum.
Imagine the war out there

I am curious as to what the form looked like that she filled out and returned to them. They seem to know an awful lot about her like she is Wiccan specifically and I think she must have detailed that she uses Tarot Cards and she probably listed that in "hobbies" never imagining that anyone would have a snit fit over it. Shes already a previous pageant winner and this was to be a judge in another pageant. So she probably didnt imagine this would effect her qualifications in any way.

Its kind of weird.