Here is the latest black and white card illustration. It is the six of cups. This card was quite a challenge as there were problems finding a pen that was appropriate. A new marker pad from the local art shop was used, but sadly it was really blotchy, so although this card has been posted it may actually have to be redrawn which is a shame as this will delay starting the next design. This card will look much clearer when colour is added as it is currently a very ‘busy’ design and visually does take quite a lot of picking apart. However it contains much of the imagery of the Rider-Waite deck upon which it is modeled. The meaning for this card can be found here:
http://www.tarot-lovers.com/six-of-cups.shtml
This card is all about memories and nostalgia. The picture shows a young man smelling a flower in a cup while a lady looks beyond him. In the back ground is a man walking away and returning to his castle. This is a great card for looking to the past and into ones childhood. Perhaps long held dreams will become a reality or maybe an old friend has some special news. A little phrase to help remember this card is as follows: ‘Happiness comes from days gone by. Child-like joy stirs old tie’ This phrase was courtesy of the local tarot circle and as soon as the author is found it will be credited. The next card in the set will be the seven of cups which will follow shortly.
In order to get a really good feel for Tarot and how the Tarot Lovers designs should look there really needed to be some very practical input. For this reason I decided to join a local tarot circle. This has probably proved to be one of the most valuable things that I have ever done. As well as being among very lovely like-minded people I have the opportunity to experience some very valuable tarot lessons. Because our lessons focus quite heavily on the imagery of the Rider-Waite cards this has proven to be invaluable in my quest to redesign my Minor Arcana pip cards. In our first lesson we took the suit of cups and we looked at the first three cards in that suit namely the ace of cups the two of cups and the three of cups. When the Tarot Lovers cards were first designed they were taken purely from my own inspiration, intuition, some tarot reference materials and my own personal feelings. However since joining my local tarot circle I can see that there is quite a lot of traditional symbolism that could be introduced into the new designs. For example the three of cups – the first card that I chose to re-design is a very happy card. It depicts a celebration and shows three maidens raising their glasses as if to toast each other. I took the idea of three people toasting each other, but in my image I need to make the two facing characters much happier as the lady in my design looks so frightened and symbolically this would be very wrong.
Typically the words associated with the three of cups includes: Joy, happiness and a renewal of belief in love. The development of personal relationships and firm committments of love and marriage. As my characters do not appear in this way I will be revisiting this card at a later stage There is a little ditty that goes with this card and I do not know who wrote it but it goes like this:
“Abundance, joy, hopes complete. Fullfillment can be very sweet.” I really do like the idea of adding a little ditty to remember a card and as I don’t know who to acredit with this one (It was one I learned in my tarot circle) I will have a go at creating one of my own which should help me to remember my cards.
Well it’s taken a while as you will see from the dates of the last post. Although it has been nearly two years since I last posted I am happy to report that we have been very busy developing our Tarot Lovers Deck. All 78 black and white cards are now finished and there is also a coloured version too! Pictures will be put up soon. However since the original Tarot Lovers Tarot deck was based around the Tarot de Marseilles deck there was much scope for adding illustrated pip cards as well instead of just using two pictures of coins for the two of coins. So that tarot enthusiasts could see the deck in use there is now a free online tarot reading program that allows the user to test out a number of spreads using the Tarot Lovers deck. It can be found here:
www.paranormality.com/free_tarot_card_reading.shtml
More updates to follow soon! (Promise)
Welcome to the paranormality blog spot. Here we are aiming to keep everyone up to date with what is happening in the world of Paranormality! The big thing that we are all working on at the moment is our tarot card deck. We thought that it would be really nice to document its progress and how we are going to move forward from our initial ideas to the finished thing. As we are moving the paranormality website forward we decided to offer a few unique products for sale that we designed ourselves in-house. However as every small publisher knows the more units you order the smaller your unit costs and hence more profit. But what if nobody likes your products and you are left with thousands to sell and no money to promote them?
This is exactly the problem that we are facing here at paranormality. In our early years we developed the ‘Tarot card Meanings Sheet’ and the sales from this has helped us to support the running costs of the website. From here we then went on to develop some tarot images and in their simplest form we published them in the ‘Tarot Lovers’ Diary 2008′ (ISBN: 978-0-9552497-2-3).
Because the paranormality website has to pay for itself we had limited funds to produce the diary run and so initially we only had a run of 50 printed. These are tiny numbers in publishing terms, but the good news was that we sold them all! We managed to get another short run done before Christmas and again we sold all of these too! For this reason we have decided to produce a 2009 version which will be due out sometime in the Autumn.
All of the proceeds this year from our diary have been ploughed back into our ‘Tarot Lovers’ Notebook’ In turn we want to plough all of the proceeds back with a final aim in mind of having enough cash to produce a unique Paranormality Tarot Deck. There will be something really special about this deck, but we can’t mention it here as we don’t want to give all of our secrets away. We will reveal why it is so special when it is launched. In order to get our deck published we have had quotes ranging from £6000 to £10,000 and we are hoping that sales of the ‘Tarot Lovers’ Notebook’ will put us some of the way there. There is soon to be a section showing how the tarot illustrations began to take shape. For anyone interested in designing their own tarot deck our step by step guide may be helpful.
Here is the latest black and white card illustration. It is the six of cups. This card was quite a challenge as there were problems finding a pen that was appropriate. A new marker pad from the local art shop was used, but sadly it was really blotchy, so although this card has been posted it may actually have to be redrawn which is a shame as this will delay starting the next design. This card will look much clearer when colour is added as it is currently a very ‘busy’ design and visually does take quite a lot of picking apart. However it contains much of the imagery of the Rider-Waite deck upon which it is modeled. The meaning for this card can be found here:
