The Silicon Dawn Tarot

September 9, 2008 6:07 AM

The Silicon Dawn Tarot
Detours are strange. Sometimes detours are lengthy and worthwhile. A year ago, I was about to dive head-first into a graphic novel, and I ended up getting diverted into doing a Tarot deck instead. Now it's done (except for the extra cards that I found in my head during the process, and hunting down a publisher), it's gotten me my first gallery show, and taught me... something about persistence, I guess. Once I recover, it's back to the comic.
posted by egypturnash (9 comments total)

Tarot isn't quite my thing, but I enjoyed your illustration. I noticed that some of them were quite unorthodox (The Lovers) and I found that quite neat. I did notice that #12 in the Major Arcana is missing a title. Was that on purpose?
posted by arcticwoman at 11:17 AM on September 9, 2008

Quite intentional. I originally had it titled 'The Hanged Man' but got several people cracking wise about her gender, so I decided to leave it titleless. A lot of old decks left Death untitled, and the Hanged Man called that because of people outside of Italy not knowing that he's hung like that because this is how you killed traitors in late-medieval Italy anyway - better to just leave her untitled.

And the decks I've been making by hand lately ended up leaving all the Majors without numbers and titles anyway, for maximum visual impact.
posted by egypturnash at 1:43 PM on September 9, 2008

Oh man. Give us an update on when you find a publisher. As much as I'd love one, I can't afford a hand made deck, but I'd love to buy a published one. This is pretty great.
posted by Caduceus at 11:48 PM on September 9, 2008

Oh, yeah, I'm definitely looking for one of those. Ain't no way I'm going to try and marshall printing and distributing them myself.

I've deliberately made the hand-made decks pricey, because I don't want to spend huge chunks of time on cranking them out - and pretty soon, it'll be winter, and too damn cold to go out back and do all the spray-mounting building a deck involves!
posted by egypturnash at 5:00 PM on September 11, 2008

I couldn't get your link to work right now (I will try later) but U.S. Games System is pretty much *the* Tarot deck publisher and they do take submissions (I think the turnaround time can vary, though). My friend had good luck with them, but his case may not be common.

You may already know about them, but just throwing it out there.
posted by darksong at 6:38 PM on September 13, 2008

The 13th? Yeah, the server was down for scheduled maintenance that day. USG is definitely already on my list of 'people who publish many decks'!
posted by egypturnash at 3:02 PM on September 18, 2008

It's a nice deck. My copy arrived today.
posted by steveburnett at 3:59 PM on September 23, 2008

I'm curious about the colors you chose for Pentacles (red) and Wands (green). Generally they would be the other way around. Was there a reason for this?
posted by All.star at 4:08 PM on October 6, 2008

Yes: I feel that Wands are a better symbol of Earth than of Fire, and that Pentacles are a better symbol of Fire than Earth. The meanings have been largely swapped with regards to other decks, though 'growing stuff' and 'financial issues' remains with the symbol.
posted by egypturnash at 8:54 AM on October 7, 2008