win?

[egypturnash]

Zomg, your tarot arts. It's something I've always...

A L W A Y S wanted to do. And here you are, doing it better than I could possibly do it myself.

You win life. <3

- a shout on my FA page

The thing about this deck is that, to a degree, I've been wanting to do one since... quite possibly before the person who said that was born, if her age is given correctly. I have vague little notes in sketchbooks dating back to the late eighties for ways I'd approach the problem of creating my own approach to seventy-eight cards.

But when I was in my early twenties, it seemed impossible. It took me long enough to finish one piece in the media I knew, let alone 78 or more. I hadn't really found a color mode I liked; Illustrator was only a few years old and I wasn't going to encounter it for some time. Now? Most of these take, at most, a solid day's worth of work - for the hard ones. I know my tools, I trust my hand to draw anything I can think of. Hell, after the way Absinthe began to shape up* this is easier than doing a comic.

It's funny how the impossible becomes possible, over time. Sometimes it still amazes me that I committed to a project of this scale, or of the scale of Absinthe. I'm not young any more, and spending a half a year or more on something that matters to me doesn't seem like such a huge chunk of my life; I'm confident that I won't improve my art so much over the time this takes that the first and last cards will look like they were done by completely different hands.

I guess this is part of growing up. The view gets longer. And a year seems like less of my life.

And I'm in a situation where I can just about afford to spend half a year on this. Is this winning?

* and yes, that's still definitely happening, it's just gotten sidelined for this what with the exhibition deadline and all.