shatterstripes

He looks far too standard-human for this deck. Horns or a tail I think. Otherwise, it's good. I can't imagine having to try to do a tarot deck off the cuff. It's been for the most part amazing. Mike and I both love your work.

The "weird" in this card is a little bit subtle -- maybe too subtle, IMHO! According to Peg, the glowy celestial thing at the top of the sky is supposed to be Earth, not the moon. I personally don't think it reads real clearly in this one, and yeah, it does need something exotic like that.

If the King looks a little too human, that's partly my fault - I kinda nudged her to put more dark-skinned humans in the deck. I've been trying to talk her out of horns or tails for him, because I didn't want her to leaven that too much!

Not even out of any political correctness, but just 'cause all sorts of human bodies are beautiful and I didn't want her to slip into an unrealistic default of familiar body shapes and builds and colors!

Also, I get the privilege of watching her work (and occasionally tickling her between cards), and don't worry -- there was nothing off the cuff about this! We'll probably tell the whole story of how the deck came about in the deck's Little White Book I'm hoping to co-write with her...

I think if the Earth could be dropped down a little, and highights be in green instead of blue, the concept will conveyed better.

I like him as it is, although a highlight on the black suit could help make it pop out some more.

However, really, it's fine as it is. Not every piece need to be a perfect ideal. Sometimes, it just has to work, and this defiantly does work.

Yeah, I raved for like ten minutes at Peg when I saw the finished product. I love me a whole mess of these cards, but this one's got an amazing sense of personality and presence to him.

I also like that he's one of the few masculine males in this deck -- he's so SOLID -- and he's such an awesome kind of male archetype. So different from the crap guys get fed as self-image these days. He looks like an actual grown-up, very practical, very imposing -- dedicated to actually making things instead of tearing things down. He looks like one of those tough guys who doesn't really care that he's a tough guy.

Yeah, I probably didn't make it clear up there, I think this is an awesome card.

I like him. Reminds me of the foreman of the road crew I worked with one summer in Georgia.

hahahaha yes.

leave it like it is.

I am really fond of this card, as is. See C4's post above about most of the reasons why. But I also understand the need to have something to tweak. For what ever reason, when I look at the card, my eyes get drawn below the center figure expecting something more to be there.

I am really digging this for all sorts of reasons:

* Different body type
* Black dude (I recently checked my art for different racial types, I lose)
* Spanners
* I instantly clicked to this idea of 'air of earth' with the combination of scaffolding (up in the sky) and building (earth)
* Outside my window I see cranes all the time

Yeah, you'll notice that these last two Court cards are both black. I've got some other wandering of skin tones from 'cafe-au-lait' to 'parchment' in the Court, and I guess some part of me went "OH SHIT THEY'RE ALL HONKIES" as I got to the end. This is a deck made by a white chick, and it's biased towards that - but hopefully these don't end up feeling like tokenism, or like tooth-grittingly saccharine inclusionism.

I'd have to see them all, but he seems to be the most masculine image in the entire deck. He does kind of stand out for not being other-worldly and yet he's so utterly your style... I don't hasten to suggest a bowl helmet or something so obvious. I trust your judgement though and if he is done, he is done.

Unless the High Priest turns out super-butch, I think he is.

The Emperor, King of Swords, Chevalier of Swords, 8 of Wands, 9 of Wands, Chevalier of Wands, 3 of Pents, King of Pents, Prince of Pents, King of Cups, Prince of Cups - that's it for masculinity, and the only one anywhere near the KoW's butchness is the CoW.

I have a note somewhere saying "Wands is where the Kirby goes!" and I think that ended up being true. With one notable exception.

"Wands is where the Kirby goes!"

...So I keep looking for this guy on the linked card and failing. I assume I'm not missing a subtle reference and that you meant something totally different; I just had a Unicorn Moment. (That being my term for when I come across a random book in some store titled something fantastical, like The Lady and the Unicorn, and I get all excited thinking it's going to be about a subject I'm really into and it turns out to be a metaphor for some 19th-Century love story or such. Bottom line is, I'd love if adding hints of Dream Land to this tarot deck was one of the personal philosophies behind it.)

Sorry, I always mean this guy when I say "Kirby". Unless it's in a sentence like "I played all the way through Kirby Super Star on my room-mate's SNES not too long after animation school".

So near and yet so far. XD

I hope you'll forgive me for thinking of "YMCA" when I first saw this image.

He is a beautiful, powerful, utterly masculine MAN, proud of who and what he is and the things he has done. If there were anything I'd change about this card, I would lower the POV slightly so it isn't as centered on that metal corner, and I might add a sticker or logo to his helmet. Nothing particularly "manly", but perhaps the yin/yang symbol might be separated and painted on that yellow base, with each half curving up over his brow - a pair of virtual horns, rather than anything added to his body.

Er, sorry, raise the POV so it focuses a little more on the character (and we see more of the planetary body behind him).

I think he looks fine. He's powerful, masculine, and well grounded. The king of the earth element, the builder in the foundation.

I didn't realize that was the earth in the sky, but that didn't change my view of it.

I think adding horns or a tail would just distract from the character. He's got a cool space-age jackhammer, that's good enough. ^.^

Today's Captcha words are the letter m and the word Lionelle.

OMG you drew Ogun.

The variety of characters in this tarot deck is wonderful.. ;.;

I like this one as he is for most of the reasons already explained better by other people above, but also because he reminds me of my best friend (well, he's shaved his beard off now and he's not that muscular, but the eyebrows, the ``don't worry, it's gonna be done and it's gonna hold'' expression, and the *presence* are spot-on).

My friend is a true hand-heart-mind man (at different times industry welder, human rights champion with his life on stake, and programmer for one of Sweden's top software outfits) with a fascinating mixed down-to-earth / head-in-the-clouds personality. So for me, this is his card.

Oh, and *blush* you're welcome.

Is it just the shading on the stripe, or is his torso a solid rectangle? If so, I really like it. It gives him a subtle hint of LEGO.

I love the character as is. But, like some other posters, I think the earth should be a bit larger with some recognizable chunk of a continent visible. Either that or make the world in the background Jupiter. Oh, that would be air of air or air of hydrogen methane soup. Scratch that idea.

I want this guy to be walking among us _now_, and I want to give him a really proper job to do, such as nobody on Earth is currently doing. Wind and solar farms are mainstream now, no challenge there, and this man deserves better than building another penis substitute for some entropy-increasing financial company. He needs to be building a space elevator or a powersat, something really audacious yet solidly contributing to our survival in the 21st century. And when the job was done, he would stand on his construction just as he is now, his very presence saying, See, we can still have a future worth living in, if we just get up and make it happen.

I love you so much!

I have a thick pamphlet, with hyperlinks to economic projections and design studies, that details some of the stuff I'd like to build with him.

He looks like he's a lot of fun to hang out with in his off hours.
What about a lunchbox filled with tentacles or something?

YES. He should remain perfectly normal. He should have something terribly odd with him, couched in something terribly mundane. Maybe some symbol of a society less crazy than ours.

Or a camera orb. }:D