Tag: Technique: Collage

Trouble comes in Threes (Three of Swords)

~ Liz A ~ 8 Comments

I was dipping in and out of the Kitchen Table Tarot and chanced upon the Three of Swords. “Ugh, what a miserable card,” I thought.

Of course that was the one I drew the next day. And honestly, the Cosmic Tarot version of the card is so incredibly creepy that I’m not going to include it here. These other versions from a Google image search are disturbing enough …

The “good” news is that I knew I wanted to use this picture of three Spanish Daggers from our front porch in the Hill Country …

At least, that’s what we called them, although I’ve never actually pinned down which of the many varieties we actually had. They were beautifully dangerous, and I asked Don to dig them up before having a bunch of little ones over to our house for Easter several years ago.

The angle of the shot had me a bit worried, until I recalled a series of sunset pictures taken from the window of the car as we drove back home through Wimberley shortly before moving …

just a flip, a slight rotation and some cropping yielded a perfect match between the image I settled on and the picture of the daggers.

So today’s card/collage is an incredibly simple homage to the wisdom that “trouble comes in threes” …

Or, as the books opine …

78 Degrees: “sorrow … pain and heartbreak … a certain calm in the symmetry of the swords … to true sorrow we can only make one response – take the pain into our hearts, accept it and go beyond it … we must not push the pain away … take it deep inside until it becomes transformed by courage and love … an embracing of life”

Kitchen Table Tarot: “you can’t really soften this card … something broke … there was loss, pain, tragedy and heartache … a transition of the soul … take a deep breath and brace for uncontrollable change”

The Creative Tarot: “the swords have been there a long time … the injury is an old one … it’s all but become abstract to the person who is suffering … the question is what happens after that … do we use it as a source of strength or an excuse to be weak? … old hurts hold a kind of influence over us our entire lives …  examine your own cause and effect, and those of the people you love … it takes love and patience to deal properly with the Three of Swords”

Okay, deep breath. Here’s a more positive bit of news.

I read in Austin Kleon’s weekly newsletter about a letterpress in Detroit. Not usually one to go in for online fundraisers, somehow this one called to me and I did indeed donate.  The Pile of Bricks has since met its goal (please note, the video promo makes me laugh out loud). And I am the happy recipient of a mini-poster by virtue of being a part of that effort …

Even the envelope it came in is way cool. But since the text on the poster is a bit hard to read, here’s another version from Instagram …

Here’s to wellness in our world, however we might get there. But likewise, let us never forget …

Five for the win (Five of Wands)

~ Liz A ~ 6 Comments

The card/collage for the Five of Wands involved a fair amount of struggle, aptly enough. It didn’t help that I’m fighting a cold, my head floating somewhere off-center. Ugh.

Anyway, as usual I started with a randomly drawn card from the Cosmic Tarot …

What caught my eye, aside from the fighting with non-lethal weapons, was the stone-y foreground, the violet tinged sky, and the wooden fence separating the two. Not my favorite card, but then again, Fives are known to be challenging.

Since Wands are represented by wildflowers and butterflies in my Texas Tarot imaginings, I wanted to use Antelope Horns milkweed, with its star-like buds and five-pointed flowers as the basis for my card/collage. But as I looked through the blog, I found waaaay too many good images and unable to choose, I printed waaaay too many of them …

5 of wands screen shot

which turned into a muddled mess that I didn’t bother to glue down …

I slept on it instead, letting the words in the books work their magic …

78 Degrees: “an exciting struggle, eagerly sought after … fighting, but not to hurt each other … they seek not to destroy”

Kitchen Table Tarot: “competition”

The Creative Tarot: “your life is not in danger … it is productive … you’re not ready … you haven’t found excellence yet … you should make sure everything is the way you want it”

I woke up wondering how I might use the four stages of milkweed development plus the hungry caterpillar as metaphor for the five wands, for competition that is not fatal, but instead leads to a new way of going for all involved.

This is where I ended up …

and I’m thinking it will make a good pairing with a future Major Arcana card featuring the Monarch butterfly. Stay tuned …

 

By the Numbers (Nine of Pentacles)

~ Liz A ~ 11 Comments

Grace asked about the Tarot deck I’ve been using and Dee suggested doing a reverse image search on Google to track it down. Which led to …

http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/cosmic/ (note: this link does contain advertising)

Who knew?!

Turns out the deck is the Cosmic Tarot by German artist Norbert Losche, published in the late 1980s. The imagery is based on the Golden Dawn and Thoth traditions (which, as yet, doesn’t mean much to me … I’m still learning).

Anyway, now I know why I thought today’s card looked like Veronica Lake …

What also caught my eye were tall slender objects, a bird (which reminded me of the cedar waxwings that descended on Cascade Trail one year), a plate of fruit, luxe cloth in the curtains, clear blue sky and an overall sense of all being better than well in the world.

My reference books concurred …

78 Degrees of Wisdom: “the good things in life”

Kitchen Table Tarot: “a woman at peace in her garden … gratitude … confidence … perseverance”

The Creative Tarot: “the payoff for a lot of hard work”

So this then …

blue skies over the floodplain, a photo of a tall slender Yaupon tree rendered in an online artistic format titled “cement,” a close-up of Yaupon berries from that same tree, along with a cedar waxwing image, both superimposed on a swatch of fabric from a book about the Arts and Crafts movement, and last, a graphic symbol for “nine.” Phew!

Of course, things didn’t go entirely well … a smudge appeared on the “Nine of Pentacles” label as I pasted it down.

“Was that when you said ‘oh shit’?” Don asked later.

Yeah, well I’m still learning.

And things aren’t quite aligned, but I’m trying (really trying) not to be too precious about this whole collage thing … trying to be loose without slipping into sloppy. Hmmm.

Okay, last for tonight is the personal symbology that I’ve devised for the Ace through Ten cards, here in draft form (still in flux) …

and the cleaned-up versions that are making their way into the card/collages …

Ace – a spiral for beginnings and potential

2 – an infinity symbol for choices and balance

3 – a triangle that might be either the foundation of a mountain or a journey to the top

4 – a stable square for structure and home

5 – a 5-pointed star for the four elements plus spirit, a pictograph of the body and a sense of needing protection or needing to take care

6 – a 6-pointed star with an upward Fire triangle and a downward Water triangle, depicting the ups and downs of life

7 – a rainbow arc for hope and yearning

8 – a double-star full of cycles and hope and sticking points

9 – a tip of the hat to Jude’s nine-patch with its sense of accomplishment and/or becoming

10 – a variation of the Kabbalah Tree of Life with implications of either abundance (good) or excess (not so much)

So yeah, doin’ it by the numbers today feels like a nine: becoming.

Addendum:

I hesitate to write too much in the blog posts lest I get bogged down in verbiage, but here is an example of what I am doing on the journal pages facing each card/collage …