harpy

A nice cup of rabies

Rantings with occasional art.

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9 of Pentacles
harpy
[info]shatterstripes


Immense, unstoppable force. Accurate delivery thereof. Success - but with strife. Victory - after fear.

I think the repetitive webs of lines might've been inspired by looking at some of Freida Harris' work on the Crowley Thoth; that sort of thing is strong through at least half the cards.

Big thanks to my boyfriends for offering helpful comments that pulled this one from 'meh' into 'wow'. Only one more pentacle, not counting the courts! The end is definitely in sight, though it will feel like it's across a mountain until I sit down and gather all my thoughts on the Court cards to create some good roughs.

In the kitchen, a little earlier in the evening, it struck me: This is the furthest I've ever gotten in a big project. (Hopefully Absinthe will out-do that by quite a lot, sometime in the next few years!) When I was younger, with what looked like a whole life stretching out to infinity, I could never have seriously tried doing something like this; I just couldn't see myself sticking to anything that long. Now that I'm getting older, with the midpoint of the century or so an unbroken human life tends to stretch to nowadays, I can think about the end of my life, somewhere out there - and I can take on projects that will take a serious chunk of that time, too.

Of course, it helps that I can casually do a finished picture in a day, when I can maintain focus on it.

And if I measure my life against my father's... well. Not too long after I finish Absinthe, I'll have outlived him. Some part of me is still afraid I won't. My 42nd birthday is going to be cause for a big celebration and some serious self-examination. Of course, that's a year after the end of the Mayan calendar anyway, so who knows?

Print available on Artspots.

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this one speaks to me a lot... it's like my concept of the "eagle mother"...

Which makes me happy, because I was worried this one was just a drawing almost completely unrelated to the meaning for half its life - just a bunch of comic-booky clichés knocked together with an obscure indy comics reference. I guess I managed to put enough in, along with some enigmaticness, to make it work!

Are you intending the vibe of "There is no way to read this card upright"? As a tarot reader who does read reversals, this upsets me. On the other hand, that sort of upset may very well be in the spirit of the card as you describe it.

Hee. Nah, I'm just keying off a throwaway line in Crowley about how 'the energy is directed downwards'. There's a pretty obvious up once you take your eyes off the figure and start looking at the background to find all the pentacles.

I'm almost tempted, now, to deliberately do a card that is hard to orient. I keep wanting to do one card that's in a landscape orientation, rather than a portrait, for instance...

(It's worth noting that my primary sources don't talk about reversals at all, but instead have this complicated system of 'elemental dignities' bringing out the kind of meanings that get ascribed to reversals. I'll tackle that in the LWB, I guess.)

However, this brings to light a problem which I suppose I am partly responsible for: 9 is indistinguishable from 6. For the final deck, I suggest that you do something like put the suit below the number on all four corners.