Tarot: High Priestess

[pyraxis]

And she turns to me with her hand extended, her palm is split with a flower, with a flame...
(Suzanne Vega)

She is a rsakk high Grehti and therefore a master of both the delicate and that which consumes.



The strands of shells are a superstition older than most people can remember; it's believed that sleeping under them will protect a priest from evil spirits.

It is actually true. A toren could not shift back out of their insubstantial form within striking range without ending up with strings and shells embedded in their body.

Link to a traditional interpretation of the high priestess card.

Comments

[pyraxis]

Yes! This is exactly what I wanted! Ok so you're not the first person to tell me the arm is wrong, but I didn't know how to fix it. That makes sense though that it's held too close to the body for the degree of foreshortening.

I see what you mean about skating more closely to the concrete instead of open ground for interpretation. There's vagueness that invites interpretation and then there's just bad technique. And that's something I did different than the 8 of Swords card - in making the whole painting more refined and detailed here it actually lost that concreteness.

So yeah, the flower, the fruit, and the woman's left hand all need fixing.

I definitely don't mind if you use the collar design. The design's actually more simple than most Karnese embroidery, but the colours and their order are traditional: red ochre (rsakk), orange-brown (tiroth), yellow ochre (griff), and turquoise (nethik). Thanks for not dinging me on the authenticity of the fabric dyes, I know on Earth, the indigo of her robe is super rare and rich, but that was how I saw the picture, and there's a whole different set of flora on Karn and I don't know what range of hues they have available. I do know the turquoise is a nethik color though and the rest of them are all ochre variants, but I still think I have to be careful of color because I don't want it to just blend in with all the other generic fantasy art out there.

I'm going to put a link to a Priestess interpretation in the original post because I forgot it.

[tigerweave.livejournal.com]

Oh what a relief that is what you wanted! Kewl :-) :-) :-)

Verdigris said to say it was actually something you said about the flower fairy drawing that helped her work out the arm thang! And yes re the difference between intpretativeness and bad technique :-D

Understood re the fabric colours. But in Europe they used to use mostly woad for that gorgeous indigo-blue colour, I think it might be a related species but one is tropical (Indigo) and the other temperate (woad) but don't quote me on that. I can ask Kite if you want to know for sure. Or google it!
Anyway, I know woad is not at all so rare and expensive as Indigo. But both have brilliantly long-lasting colours. In the old European tapestries you can see all the other colours have faded so much over time but the blues are still incredibly vivid, as it doesn't fade.

And indigo is actually a cloth-preserver, so in old fabrics the blues will be fine while the rest is moth-eaten or disintegrating from age.

In my world too the colours are from different plants than here. And even the "silk" there is from a kind of moss, not from moths, but it is certainly very silky, and similar sort of expense and exclusiveness to here.

I hadn't realised the collar was embroidery, I had presumed it was a kind of lace!

Uh, yeah... don't mind me spouting on my fave subject *sheepish*

- Imoh

[tigerweave.livejournal.com]

Nope, not the same family at all!

http://www.botgard.ucla.edu/html/botanytextbooks/economicbotany/Isatis/index.html

But it is the same chemical substance in both plants that produce the blue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isatis_tinctoria (the bit called Woad and Indigo

And more...
http://www.indigopage.com/herbal/herbal.htm