counting

[egypturnash]

Hmm. My machine says the earliest creation date on a Tarot card is October 6. And I'll be finishing this thing up somewhere around the beginning of August. Nearly a year.

Looking back at the post dates of the images, January and February were a write-off - there's two pieces of other kinds of art, and the 10 of Swords right at the end of February. So toss those months from the reckoning: if I stay on schedule, I'll have the standard 78 cards and two extras done in eight months of work. Let's call it nine, to include the overflow that I'm sure will happen, and the remaining six or ten extras (two Fools, the Querent, the remaining 99s, and possibly the VOID Court).

Nine months of my life. Well, at least I don't think I'll have to spend the next twenty or so years raising it and putting it through college.

Now I know why so many people stop at two or three cards, or just the Majors. 3/4 of a year - if you're fast - is a big chunk of work. I can't imagine what it would be like if my art process was averaging one a week. Or longer.

And, you know, I never really made an official "tarot" icon, either. My current default is from the piece that ended up being repurposed for the Chariot, yeah, but I don't think of it as explicitly from the deck. There's something in that icon lack about my relationship to this project versus, say, my relationship to Absinthe, but I'm not sure what it is. Perhaps I feel like I didn't choose to do this; it chose me.

I joke about "the expansion sets" but you know what? When this is done, it's done; I want to get the fuck back to Absinthe, I want to move on to some new frontiers of media. I'll stay involved in it for getting it published and helping with the book, but I so do not want to spend another half a year doing alternate takes, or more add-ons. Maybe I'll revisit it when I'm sixty or something. Maybe never.

This is the biggest project I've done so far, but I don't think it's going to be the biggest ever. Absinthe is projected to be at least 150 pages, most with 3-5 panels on them. I guess that's what I do when I can knock out a full-color, detailed piece every three days without any problems. Do projects that involve a lot of them. I'm on my way towards forty and my brain has shifted to a longer view.

Comments

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

Not in the same level of detail, but this is kind of what it was like for me and Fite. Page a week (much less than your average) for two and a half years. It is a big project but you know, after that, it doesn't seem so hard to think about the next one or one possibly longer. It helps to know that you CAN do it. I'm sure you'll feel the same. And even while you're doing Absinthe, you'll have time to dally with other things, perhaps even painting on the side, just to keep you limber and artistically curious.

Have a party when you're done. Seriously. Celebrate your accomplishment and know that it was a big one.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

There was a lot of art in each page of Fite! - a few panels, bgs, and so on. Maybe less art-done-per-day on average what with you having a Real Job to wrangle, I dunno. With projects this big that kind of comparison just gets lost next to the overall scale, until you get into comparing some 800-page epic with a 200-page one.

And yeah, celebration is definitely something I need to do. 'Get really drunk' is a possibility. As is 'get the fuck away from Illustrator for a couple weeks'. We're planning a visit to Seattle in September and it'll be a good excuse to not think about finished art for a while...

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

When I did my Free as a Bird animated film, I felt the same way. I spent nearly a year working on it and by the time it was done I was just so happy it was done. Part of me wishes I could go back and make the animation better because it was my first big animation project and a lot of my drawing is really stiff but on the whole, probably just better to move to new projects. :)

Congrats on getting so far on the tarot deck BTW. It's been interesting to watch. One thing I've been curious about: Have you had anyone try drawing several cards at random and checking their color harmony with one another? I don't know if it'd be good or bad to have certain cards clash with others or have one that visually dominates another.

The only tarot cards I've ever worked with are the 'Daughters of the Moon'. Like your deck, they have extra cards. Goddess cards, two lovers and two fools. They're also round rather than rectangular so angle takes on an interesting meaning in the layout.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I've shuffled them around with a little virtual card thing I adapted from someone else's code, but I don't have any physical cards yet. Been too busy drawing them to try and think about any kind of output!

I have pretty strict color rules so it shouldn't be too much of an issue: the number cards are all in a VERY tight palette, all using b/w and the same muted red/green/blue/yellow. The Majors are any color palette I wanted, and the Courts are in free palettes with an emphasis on their suit color, so they're clearly related to their suit, but clearly distinct from the numbers...