pyraxis | Entries tagged with tarot

There was never any question. The Magician has to be Gillian. The first person Fiona meets in Water Song, he's a merchant in the sea market who offers her uncommon kindness and shelter in his mysterious enchanted tent.

I've been revisiting the first chapter of Song of the Sons, since I've been exchanging it for feedback on a wonderful writing critique site. Gillian and his tent are the real stars of this chapter, and this painting has been sitting in the back of my head, in various forms, since the early days of developing the Water Song. Now I have the patience to render it fully.

The Magician is the first person the Fool meets in their journey. He opens the door into mystery and invites them to step through. To answer the Magician's call is to allow the potential of the unknown into your life, to look at what your deepest instincts are drawing you towards, and to accept that your unconscious has its own reasons. Those reasons are valid even if they initially make you uncomfortable and wary. Before understanding comes exploration, and exploration calls for courage and curiosity.

A brown-skinned man sits at a table, concentrating intensely on the tiny hammer in his right hand, the rod in his left hand, and the stone bead that they have just split into three fragments in a flash of light. Around him is a cluttered merchant tent, with shelves and chests containing goods of all sorts, from plants to scrolls to coloured yarn and cloth. Under the table is a half-covered basket of exotic fruit, and a large shadowed chest. In the foreground is another table, spread with meat pies of all shapes and sizes. In the background hangs a canopy made of brightly colored curtains.

wyld_dandelyon is doing Dreaming and creativity-friendly tarot readings for the new year.

Anyone can ask for a single card draw. Tips of US $2 or more let you get a clarifying card. She's also doing five-card readings with whatever focus you like for US $25.

You can ask for a card for yourself or for someone in a game, or a protagonist or villain in a story. You can ask for inspiration for a creative project.

I highly recommend it, it's rare to find someone so open to different shades of imagination.

It was one of her readings that encouraged me to allow people to take care of me during pregnancy.

Current Music: Obnoxious toddler music videos

The World is the 21st and last trump card in the traditional tarot deck.

Sha singing the water's return.

A small dark-skinned boy standing on a desert rock amidst the crashing wave of a flooding riverbed breaking around him. His head is thrown back, his arms spread, and he's singing with all his might. He's surrounded by a round nimbus of rainbow amidst the water spray. In the background is a clear blue sky and the round roofs of mud brick buildings,

A small dark-skinned boy standing on a desert rock amidst the crashing wave of a flooding riverbed breaking around him. His head is thrown back, his arms spread, and he's singing with all his might. He's surrounded by a round nimbus of rainbow amidst the water spray. In the background is a clear blue sky and the round roofs of mud brick buildings,

I started this one a long time ago. At least before covid. I could never get Sha's pose and proportions and expression right, so after a few failed attempts at reworking it, it went on the back burner until I could figure out what the problem was.

But now the cub is almost the same age as Sha was when this happened. I have a perfect model running around my own house. So I went back to it and finally got it looking more natural. I'm mostly happy with how it's come out now.

A prison made of stone and colour.

In the traditional Rider-Waite, a hand comes out of the clouds, offering a fourth cup to a person who has found no succour in the three they have. Here, the hand is made of cristal, and anything it might offer is laced with corruption. Nor is there escape to be found in water that's iced over.

The only way out is through.

A young woman curled up on the floor of a cave, with her arms hugging her stomach and her knees drawn up to her chest, a careworn expression on her face. Her long dirty blond hair hangs loose around her shoulders and she's dressed in dark-colored rags and furs. In front of her are three wide shallow bowls, glowing deep blue-purple, either iced over or laced with lightning. Behind her on a rock is a crystal formation, its prongs holding up a fourth bowl, this one with a swirl of rainbow liquid inside. The cave is lit with sickly yellow-green light, with areas glowing teal and purple.

The card of treachery and betrayal.

A night scene of a woman with her back to the viewer, looking back over her right shoulder. On her left shoulder she's hefting a bundle of three swords, holding their blades with leather gloves over her bare arms and hands. She's dressed scantily with a jeweled red cloth over her hair, draping down to cover her breasts, and a golden brown jeweled cloth over her hips and buttocks. The rest of her pale skin is exposed. Behind her and on the left are two fallen men crouching in the grass, clutching bloody wounds, their swords lying useless at their feet.

A stern and regal-looking black woman with a gold circlet over short, swept-back hair, the sun haloed behind her head as she drives a chariot pulled by two beasts that look like a cross between an exotic deer and a horse. One has a deep grey coat and the other light tan, but both have brownish-red stripes and patches of white and tan on their faces. They have large ears silhouetted against the light, two curving horns each, and leather harnesses attached to reins held by the woman.

ProCreate, Photoshop, iPad and Apple Pencil

Ua'lin... being Ua'lin. How seriously you take her is up to you.

This is actually taken from one of the first pictures I ever drew of her. ( Read more... )

A grimacing woman dressed in ragged furs, kneeling in a puddle of water in the grass and surrounded by eight stacked goblets, brimming with a reddish-brown liquid. In an abstract misty background, the blurred shapes of two deerlike creatures are fleeing out of the frame, and in the two places where their hooves touch down, they meet the surface of rippling water. Each creature has a curved and slightly luminous horn, and behind them is a round disc reminiscent of an eclipse, patterned with reddish brown tribal markings.

ProCreate, Photoshop, iPad and Apple Pencil

A lightning-blasted tree stump in a storm, seen from the side, with a cross-section of the ground underneath. A dark figure is curled in fetal position in the ground beneath the tree, with roots growing down from its stomach. The figure glows with mottled green and blue light. At the foot of the tree stump are three broken bowls, and deep under the ground, below where the roots have reached, are two small glowing pockets filled with pools of water.

Photoshop and Wacom

Current Music: Mari Boine - Idjagiedas

Two figures embracing as they fall from a stormy sky, trailing a shower of bedraggled black feathers. The woman's figure is nude and has captured the fading light of the sun in her belly. The man's figure is half-transformed into a wolf, with his face obscured under a wolf's-head mask with yellow eyes that stare directly out of the painting.

Photoshop and Wacom

Current Music: How Great Thou Art - Pentatonix w/Jennifer Hudson

A deerlike being standing in a dark foresty place, with head lowered over a shallow bowl of water. He is staring directly into the viewer's eyes and his long tongue is lapping the water. His ears are cocked as if listening and there are dark circles of fur around his eyes. On his head, instead of horns, is a crown of living tentacles that coil and spiral like a halo around his head.

Photoshop and MotionComputing tablet

Concept was inspired from a sketch by the Spacerobots

There is a lot that could be said about the Nethik King, but very little that he will let me say tonight. Maybe the image can speak for itself.

Current Mood: lonely

A young black boy struggling to hold aloft an overflowing ornate wood chest. Water is cascading out of the chest, leaving puddles in the sand at his feet. The boy is wearing a brightly coloured woven loincloth with geometric patterns. In the background is a mud brick building with a round roof and set of double doors.

Photoshop, Wacom and MotionComputing tablet

( All my disclaimers )

Anyway, it's Sha, struggling to lift an overflowing kifu, in front of Masta Ua.

Current Mood: reluctant

I've been working on this one for a while, but that's mainly because I started it before our move. Today I finally had the chance to put some finishing touches on it.

They are Auben and Amber, two of the people in the Water Song.

A young, well-built black man clasping in his arms a shorter blond woman with long braids pulled into a hairnet at the nape of her neck. She's wearing a simple vest over a light blouse and skirt billowing in the wind, and he's wearing a fine woven tunic with geometric tribal patterns and loose pants. Falling from her hand is a broken branch with an apple. Behind him is a desert with a dead tree and a small white-robed figure standing nearby. Behind her are lush tropical plants.

Photoshop and MotionComputing tablet

The Lovers is a card about pairs and duality. It's the sixth card of the Major Arcana. There's a sense of ambivalence about it - sometimes it features a man caught between two women instead of a man and a woman joined. The idea is that something else has to be given up, some sacrifice has to be made, in order to pursue the love that has come into the querent's life. Auben and Amber both turned away from major influences in their lives as they turned to each other. The card can mean falling in love with a person, but it can also mean coming to something which feels as if it completes you. It's a bond which is felt at a deeper level than the conscious mind.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Classical radio - something with strings

A young man in a vest and red pants, with three gold discs around his waist, is perched on a platform that hangs by a rope. On the jungle floor below is another man belaying the other end of the rope, and a woman sitting on a mat and sorting fruit. On the hanging platform is a big basket of fruit, and the young man is reaching for a bunch of triangle-shaped fruits above him.

Photoshop and MotionComputing tablet

Thanks to Photography On The Run for the reference material.

( Collecting sarfruit )

A smiling woman standing on a sunny plain with her two young children clinging to her skirt. She is carrying a baby in a sling of fine striped cloth and cradling his head as she nurses him. In the clear sky above are flying two birdlike creatures. A tree in the background has monkeylike creatures hanging from the branches, and a large lizard and a herd are also in the background.

This was a hard one.

I had to bring it together so it somehow represented both the essence of the Karnese Mother goddess, and the more ordinary scene of a nethik mother, whose people are the most pastoral of the four recognized shapes.

That's why you can see each of the four shapes in the background, even if there isn't space for much detail. The Mother protects and nurtures all shapes, and though the Grehti priests in their cosmology divide them into a hierarchy of greater and lesser shapes, those which take human form and those which don't, all of them live together in the Mother's cradle. She is the land and the magic and life force it contains.

( Nethik secrets )

Anyway, some of the nethik are nomadic and others are farmers, and they've developed the most advanced farming techniques known on Karn. (Advanced being a relative term since the culture itself is neolithic.) They have a lot of skill with herbs both for medicine and for cloth dyes.

Current Music: Yanni - In the Morning Light

A smiling man by a campfire animatedly tells a story to a small group of people around him. The young boy listens entranced, the teenage girl looks at him coyly and the old woman has a melancholy smile. Campfire smoke curls up through the storyteller's hands and into the evening sky. Rocks shelter the camping space and the view behind the man is out over a dry valley with scrub plants.

Photoshop and MotionComputing Tablet

( The Shashigai are the storytellers of Karn )

( When storytelling goes wrong )

The storyteller has the power to touch people's hearts, to capture them and hold them. The real test of his character comes with what he does with them afterwards.

Who do you allow to tell your story?

Two young kids are playing in a plumeria tree, surrounded by leaves and blossoms. The boy is swinging upside down from a branch and the androgynous-looking girl is perched in a split in the trunk. The sky is warm burnished yellow and the shape of the sun is outlined in red ochre. In the distance, through the haze, is a forest or jungle on the side of a volcano.

Photoshop and MotionComputing Tablet

The Sun card is like the Garden of Eden in reverse: the innocence that lies at the end of the adventure. In the story of the Major Arcana, the Fool has come through his troubles and confusion and found his way into a flowering garden where he's invited by a little boy to come play. When he takes the boy's hand, he realizes that the boy is a part of his own nature, the part which isn't held back by adult burdens. It's about rebirth and freedom, joy and creativity, and it implies connectedness to the environment and all the things that are waiting there to be discovered.

The person who draws the Sun card might be ready to look at things in a new light. Carrying the wisdom of their latest journey, they can bring a fresh perspective to whatever they set out to do.

Current Music: Gintama theme (one of them)

A dark-haired young woman in a green tunic and furs is on hands and knees in the dirt, surrounded by seven low wooden bowls filled with water. Moving clockwise from the one behind her, the bowls contain a bow and arrow, a rock, a red and yellow snake, a thorny rose, chunks of meat, a knife, and a speckled egg.

Photoshop and MotionComputing Tablet

I had to cheat a little bit on this one, because those are Earth symbols, not Karnese ones. I didn't want there to be too much of a cultural barrier to identifying with the imagery.

( About the nethik )

The Seven of Cups is about what dreams may come.

( The traditional Seven of Cups )

Current Mood: anxious
Current Music: Brulé & Airo - Dancing Feathers

A large gryphon-like creature with heavy folded wings perches on a rocky outcropping with its back turned. Its head is turned sideways and one baleful yellow eye is fixed on the viewer. Three swords are leaning against the rock nearby and a fourth lies on a fallen fur cloak on the ground. The dawn sun is rising over the mountains in the background.

Photoshop and MotionComputing Tablet

( The Griff Place )

Current Music: Tatara Fumu Onnatachi - Eboshi Tatara Uta

Two snarling young men in furs and leathers, both gripping the blade of the same sword in their right hands. Each one holds another sword by the hilt in his left hand. Below the sword they're fighting over is a smashed melon. Stormclouds are crowding overhead in an ominous grey sky.

Photoshop and MotionComputing tablet

This is the card for broken hearts.

Simple as that. All the rest of it is pop psychology.

Pele's little sister was a badass healer. Her name was Hi'iaka. I'm reading a Hawai'ian myths and legends book we brought back from our trip. I just had to say that, because it's awesome.

Meanwhile, here is the latest tarot picture, and a story.

Two figures have just jumped off a cliff in the indigo light of evening. One is a dark-haired woman with her shoulders marked with red clay or blood and her arms stretched wide, bearing up the wings of the other figure, who is half raven and half wolf. The wolf head is twisted around and biting the leg of the woman. The raven head is cutting in its beak the thread that holds the sun in the sky. It has swallowed a little piece of the sun, which is glowing in it and the wolf's stomach.

Photoshop and MotionComputing tablet

( Circa 2006... )

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Firesongs (Echo)

Adventures climbing the fourth wall

Entries tagged with tarot

The Magician

Tarot readings

The World

Four of Cups

Five of Swords

The Chariot

Eight of Cups

Five of Cups

The Tower

King of Cups

Ace of Cups

Tarot: The Lovers

Tarot: Three of Coins

Tarot: The Empress

Tarot: King of Wands

Tarot: The Sun

Tarot: Seven of Cups

Four of Swords

Tarot: Three of Swords

Tarot: The Fool