More 9 of Wands Drama

I am posting now to pass a few minutes while I see if the 9 of Wands recovers from the abuse I just heaped on it.  I was literally scrubbing it vigorously with a toothbrush, ack!   I scrubbed all the paint off yesterday then couldn’t help myself and laid on some more paint.  Then hated that too and scrubbed it off again today.  It’ll be a miracle if it makes it at this point.  I should just scrap it, but i want to give it another shot. 

9 of Wands problems and solutions.

I think I figured out at least one aspect of the dream I wrote about yesterday.  I woke up at 4am this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep so I came downstairs, laid on the couch, and thought about things.   Something I noticed over in the office yesterday was that it smelled funny, like something had died and I hoped nothing had died inside the walls because I couldn’t find a reason for it in the room itself.   After I started painting the fumes from the turp overrode the smell and I was thankful.  I remember thinking, though, that it was odd that it smelled a little like orange. 

9 of Wands, first night painting.

I didn’t have a great time painting tonight.  Every time I tried to blend colors they were lifting instead leaving bleached out spots, and all the colors that were looking so beautiful on the palette, and were so well thought out, looked terrible on the painting.  Why?  I seem to remember strangeness happening with the colors in the ACe of Wands.  I remember that I kept adding green to my red to calm it down and it kept getting redder which I thought was against the laws of color mixing physics.   I didn’t scan it because it just wasn’t looking very good.    Every painting is such an experiment!  I hope I can pull this one together.    I can always resort to the big wipe out but that never bodes well.    Actually, I think I will do that tomorrow morning before the color sets too much.  Sigh.

Art is Freedom

After a lot of thought I decided that I wasn’t going to force anything and so there are no columns.  Or I should say, they did not want to be depicted seperately in this image.  So, I finished up and mounted the sketch.  I let it all dry overnight and today I ill mask off the edges and start my first layer of paint.  Woo hoo!

9 of Wands, no new sketch yet…

I worked on the 9 of Wands last night but image wise was totally unproductive!  It’s the darn background!!    I guess I’m not totally sold on the columns….I don’t like, maybe, adding elements I don’t *feel* there, its almost gimmicky, and yet, there is nothing wrong with some continuity between cards.  I guess the real question is, though, what is there?  I keep trying to see and don’t see anything.  Maybe that just isn’t something that exists in the highest pinnacles of Fire.  I suppose the tiger and the woman ARE the columns and repeating them is redundant. 

Maybe it was a bad idea all around – born of the 9 of Disks where everything looks like a column.

I’ll have to do more thinking on it.     I’ll let you know.

I suspect a good meditation is in order.

9 of Wands sketch 3

My mom has been here the last 4 days (had a good visit) so I haven’t had a chance to work on it until tonight.    I realized I made a big, big mistake.  I didn’t plan on any kind of a background.  Bad Marie!  So now I have to stop here and make some decisions and then fit it in here and then work around it.  I had been thinking about some sort of columns in all of the 9s, the Egyptian type columns in the 9D, I was thinking obelisks for the 9C, mountains in the 9S and then the 9W?  I don’t remember what I Was thinking, it might have been pyramids, or towers or some such.  It could be trees.  Maybe Towers would be best….I’ll have to think about it and make a decision.

9 of Wands sketch 2

That’s where I am so far.

9 of Wands sketch 2

This is last nights work. It doesn’t seem like much for a couple hours does it?   I totally lose myself though.  Lately I get so lost that any noise that snaps me back into reality scares the crap out of me.    Last night Michael decided to warn me that he was entering the room by making a mannish shriek and I happened to be sipping coffee and whoosh all over the place it went!  First thing I did was check the drawing, phew it was ok.  Truthfully, it would have to be near destroyed to stop me from using it.  How much can a few coffee spots hurt?  Chaos is GOOD! I’ve probably mentioned this before and I will again, I used to have this great art teacher who taught illustration, he liked to tell a story how he would run out of a particular shade of brown so he would just load up his airbrush with coffee and spray away!    

9 of Wands sketch 1

There’s what I did last night.   I just traced my rough sketch onto my good paper then started rendering the tigers nose.   It’s slow going right now because I am trying to design the stripes just right so I am drawing and erasing, drawing and erasing.  I usually try to work that kind of thing out on the rough sketch but for some reason I felt like skipping it this time. 

9 of Wands Ride the Lightning

(Boy does this music bring back a flood of old memories!)

Tarotwise it has been like a rollercoaster this past week! 

I have the 9 of Wands rough sketch nearly done.  Last week I thought I had it and then I didn’t have it at all.  I just couldn’t reconcile the opposing natures of it, I couldn’t figure out why I was seeing the tiger image so strongly yet it didn’t really differentiate itself from the 8 of Wands and didn’t express the idea I had for the 9 of Wands.  I was thinking of the Tiger as this powerful wild beast that represented the power and ferocity of the subconscious.  But, how can that be?  How can that lead into the 10 of Wands which is the rider on a white horse…often thought to be the anti-christ but to me is a savior figure itself.  That requires thoughtful consciousness, not brute force, doesn’t it?  That subconscious power, to me, is  more in the realm of Cups/Water.