About Damn Time…
After many delays, diversions and other inconvenient things starting with “D”, not to mention Christmas, I am pleased to present the “0” card of the Major Arcana, “The Fool”.
The outline drawing took a little over an hour as I had done a bunch of preliminary studies to nail down my composition. The line shading took about another seven hours with the colour coming in around four. Mounting and titling added another half hour or so to bring it in at around twelve and a half hours, spread out over four weeks or so.
Adjacent is the linework. As always, the meditative state that I get into doing the line shading is a much needed antidote to the other stressors in my life. That’s a big part of why I’ve made the style choices I have for this deck. It gives me an ongoing motivation to practice something that benefits my mental health, and which I might otherwise neglect.
And not a moment too early…
The finished card for “The Fool”. The one change I did which was “pre-meditated” was changing the dog. In Smith’s original art, I find the dog almost appears to be egging the fool on to his doom. At the very least, it appears to happily be going along with his self-destructive behaviour. I wanted to change that up and make it clearer that the dog is trying to warn him of the danger of what he’s doing. That to me is a far more dog-like thing to do.
As always, any feedback is more than welcome.
Cheers, W.