A King's Journey Tarot

The first part of the design process is to start with a sketch.   Well, in truth it started with three years worth of organizing my correspondences and calculating everything to verify that it would, indeed, work.  After I was confident that my system would work in the way I intended and my thought process could be visualized, I soon started on the sketches.  

 I started on the sketches in October of 2008. 

 First, I would meditate on the image, and asked how it would like to be represented visually. After I received the image, I sketched it out in my sketch book.

 Then I would go back and 'read' the image to see how the image related to both my theme and traditional meanings of that card. 

Here's a sample of my sketches.....

Well.. I'm sure it goes without saying that I'm no professional artist! Since I don't have a lot of artist tools lying around, I chose to use colored pencils to color in my sketches. Sometimes this worked well on paper, but didn't upload well, and the color faded or turned into another color all together. They looked much better on paper than in a computer file, needless to say! Thank goodness for James, who is able to intuitively understand my descriptions, sketches and what I intended with the cards! I do think it helps that we always seem to be mentally in tune with one another.. and work well together and maintain GREAT communication with one another.

After I uploaded the scan, I would send a full description and meaning of the card, outlining important elements of the card, in a pdf file and email it to James.

Here's the Five of Coins that I provided to him..   

Next step in the design stage, I can only describe as, James working magick. He sketches out the images and then sends them back to me to make sure they were what I intended.  He is amazing in the way that he understands exactly what I am trying to depict visually, and nearly always intuitive in adding the things that I overlooked in the detail of the drawing.  The pencil that he uses for penciling is a sharplet-2 mechanical pencil which used a lead size of 0.5.   He's used this same pencil since he was 19! 

After me and James agree that we are happy with the new pencil drawing.. he inks the picture. Since he scans it in as lineart, this is a must!  Unless he inks over all the pencil lines, they won't show up properly on the scan. So, every line that he wants to show up in full detail on the screen, he will ink over.  The pen he uses to do this is a  Staedtler pens sizes 0.3 - 0.8

Now it's ready, so James will scan it onto his computer as a lineart.

 Next James will get out his Drawing Tablet, made by a company called Trust, to color in the pictures on the computer.  The make is TB-3100.

James uses Photoshop.. here's what it looks like as he is coloring it.

Here's what the finished product looks like after all the renditions. Amazing isn't it? :D

 After James sends it back to me, I 'read' it again to make sure it is readable. Sometimes, we have to do some editing or changing. We, thankfully, haven't had to do too many, and the ones we have done, lucky were relatively simple and done in layers so it was possible without destroying the entire work.