shatterstripes

The last Fool to be drawn - fifth in all, if I count the messy sketch I did waaay back at the very beginning of this project. The first one in the sequence. Or the zeroth, to be more precise.

The pale cyan is a placeholder for Interesting Printing Processes; the final card will be entirely black and white except for the glint of color in one camera eye's reflection.

Also big thanks to "CAPSLOCK" for inspiring the background of this one; a few hours after seeing this piece (nsfw?)the rough for this all fell firmly into place.

Text:
The cycle begins for what it thinks is the first time. Void vibrates against void and finds dualities; an unfinished sketch is sent out into the world. That ground wasn't there a second ago, and she's too busy wondering at the new sensation of "foot leaving grass" to worry about the cliff she's about to fall off of. And thus a fool is born. A little feral fox of spirit and fear yaps at her: the beginnings of "common sense" looking into the forthcoming tumble, and trying to warn her off. Too late. It always is.

Coming soon, she'll learn greynesses, learn color. But this primal and raw, all she's got is "yes" and "no". On or off, 1 or 0. She's barely more than a biological robot with an empty brain to gather imprints and feed them back into herself. And she has more eyes than she knows how to use.

And speaking of feedback, maybe this card is already starting to set up some of that in your visual cortex. And in the watching hover-cameras that follow her.

Unlike the other Fools, this one's not leaping into nature. She's leaping into the layer of society built on top of that, symbolized by the cityscape resolving out of the white nothingness. Maybe this means she's really the last of the Fools; ordering the unnumbered is always complicated!

In this three-way unfolding of the Fool, this is the Zeroth fool. This is the Maiden, the utterly inexperienced, the one bursting with potential.



And now the question is, do these three cards (and their ghost sister, who I am seriously thinking of seeing if I can reproduce in the booklet at the proper size for crafty or opinionated people to do some cutting and pasting) work together as an unfolding of and expansion on the traditional meanings of Foolishness in a Tarot deck - at least insofar as this deck needs to work as anything based on traditional Tarot? Hopefully! This one's done and I don't think I have the other two Fools on my list for going back and playing with, so if it doesn't stand as one, oh well!