eetarot

[eetarot]

THE EMPRESS | all 3 style tests together along with the first sketch purely for the sake of completeness. against the odds I think the red/orange turned out my favourite. when it comes time to do the full illustration i'l test some other colour combos with less detailed thumbnails, but this helped me set some things in stone early that'll help with the other designs.

[eetarot]

had fun on this alternate colourway but its definitely dead in the water: neither my camera or scanner can make sense of the contrast between the purple and green and everything comes out looking a different colour that it actually is on paper. c'est la vie!

wanted to lean into the mother nature thing a bit here and make the background mottled like leaves but my wet-in-wet techniques aren't the strongest and i left the paper to dry too long. gotta practice that a bit more before trying again 🫡 i also hate how the line art looks and won't be doing that again. i do quite like the textures i was able to get in the gold though!

[eetarot]

THE EMPRESS | great mother/mother nature figure; compassion; nurturing; love and acceptance / unpredictability; fickle whims; natural disasters and 'the great recycler'

they will embrace me tonight as a father and a son

and i will carry homo sapiens through the night

Traditionally the design for the empress often includes a real female head of state or someone who represents such, in a place of that authority. I wanted to be less literal about it, and I was really attached to the image of Tin's fox as this sort of grand protector of humanity.

These aren't finished designs by any means, really just tests for different colourways. I'm trying to make a final decision on whether I want to stick to semi-realistic palettes, or go balls to the wall with something more stylised. Initially I was thinking true abstract would be more fun, but I ended up really loving how this first one turned out! Will test a few different cards and see how I feel.

So far I've put her in a pretty 1:1 rendering of one the queen's thrones, with a few tweaks like replacing the lions on the posts with more foxes. Though I like the effect the crown has on the silhouette/composition, it sort of feels like it doesn't "fit". The big triangle does make me think of the Mountainhead logo, so for the third mockup I might try replacing it with that and see how it looks. It's a powerful visual, but I'm really conscious of overusing it. We'll see how it goes.

(I know Jon refers to it as he in he song but this ain't about him. it's my art and I'll transsexualise if I want to)

[eetarot]

Prelim sketches: Priestess; Tower.

THE HIGH PRIESTESS | human wisdom; the fool’s first teacher; “representing the inner life and the method for contacting it, as well as the contemplative study of nature and spiritual mystery”

Her phantom head is thinking for all mankind I saw her portrait in the mail Her phantom head was directing the holiest of hunts

Come Alive Diana - Man Alive

this is the card I’m most certain about and I’ve known more or less exactly what I want since day one. I’m playing with composition more than anything - do I want a zoomed in portrait-style image or something distant and full bodied? I think I like the ghost colouring.

THE TOWER | “In practically all renditions of the Tower card, disaster is striking or has just struck. The demons of madness and despair are released from ancient hiding places, and nature conspires with human failings to destabilize a society. The upheaval is collective and impersonal”

metroland is burning no god is here ///// you left the earth you left us here to burn

Metroland is Burning - Raw Data Feel

I feel pretty sold on metroland as the representation of the tower, I just have to decide exactly how to depict it. I really like the visual of the entrance with the big escalators, especially since there’s a nice additional lyric reference there ('escalator breathing in a hydra howl’) and it’s one of the overriding memories i personally have of metroland. i’m really bad at architectural perspective though and the thought of how long it would take me to produce a passable drawing of all those columbs and signs before I even make it to painting the fire sort of makes me want to quite while I’m ahead. would also like to add some burning people running out of the doors in the final image. my backup if that fails is this one of the swingy thing being hit by lightning, which is definitely a less interesting piece but perhaps more within my skill level lol

[eetarot]

The first official post.

I posted some preliminary work over on @qwertyfingers a few days ago, but I've decided to be organised for once and stick everything on it's own blog, so here's an intro post for organisational clarity. I'll be posting any and all updates about the project here, and that's all it'll be used for, to keep the streams from crossing.

What is this project?

I’m aiming to produce a full major arcana for a tarot, using themes, imagery, characters and places pulled from Everything Everything lyrics and odds and ends like interviews, song Q&As and so on.

Some major arcana cards have immediately evident analogues in EEs body of work. For example, The Empress is a ‘great mother’/'mother nature’ figure, protective and wrathful in turn, obvious parallels to Tin (The Manhole).

They will embrace me tonight as a A father and a son And I will carry homo sapiens through the night

Our Empress can be represented by the Fox, and potentially bring in some evolution imagery from Choice Mountain, Leave the Engine Room.

Judgement meanwhile is a representation of a rapture-like apocalyptic event that rewrites everything we know - which is heavily telegraphed in much Mountainhead but especially Wild Guess and The Witness.

Do you know what I saw? Nothing but endless fields of bodies swimming in the pit There was blinding light There were many eyes How could I know that? How could I know that? If I wasn’t there?

The role of Judgement in this deck will be played by this great accident in the pit. The exact visual it will take on is less apparent, but we have our basic inspiration already.

Other cards are more difficult. The Devil is hard precisely because there are almost too many options to draw from, but few prominent or recurrent enough to be the obvious choice. There are multiple places to draw lyrical inspiration for The Hermit from, but none of them provide any visual information. But this whole thing is a process and I’ll get there eventually.

Why are you doing this?

I had the initial idea for this project in 2021. I became really intrigued by tarots status as a sort of agreed-upon set of glyphs and stories shared across time and spent a lot of time researcing the different designs and meanings of cards throughout time. I don’t “believe” in the power of tarot any more than astrology (i.e. not at all), but I’m fascinated by the function of the imagery and art of the cards themselves.

During my reading I got to thinking about what I feel strongly enough about to consider creating a deck and I struck upon this. The first card I ever had a plan for was The High Priestess. Described as a sort of spiritual or social leader-by-example, a representative of the best of humanity and our collective knowledge. In a tounge-in-cheek way, that’s exactly what Come Alive Diana is about.

Her phantom head is thinking for all mankind I saw her portrait in the Mail Her phantom head was directing the holiest of hunts

I was immediately struck by the image of a spectral Diana cradling her own severed head in a pretty gruesome pastiche of the traditional depiction of the card, and haven’t been able to get the thought of it out of my mind since. It’s spiralled out of control since then.

So yeah. Mostly I’m doing this because it interests me on a purely artistic level, and because it’s a fun challenge to approach something really creative in a strangely scientific way. Like I’m dissecting and analysing a bunch of art I really enjoy and creating horrifying chimeras with the remains. I love it.

How will it all get done?

I’m a relatively experienced watercolour and gouache painter and illustrator, though I’ve never tackled a project this big before. The thing that scares me most is having to learn architectural drawings for at least two of the cards I have planned so far. But I look forward to it.

Right now I’m working on typing up all of the notes I have scattered between sketchbooks and notepads about my ideas for different things and making sure I know which areas need my attention most right now. Otherwise, I’m just vibing.

I welcome any questions or suggestions you might have in my ask box or messages! In an ideal world I’d like to complete all of the card artwork myself, but I have no pre-existing skill in graphic or product design and have no idea how to go about choosing a font or designing a card beyond the illustration and so if that’s something you do know about and would like to get involved please do.

Currently I have no plans of printing these up or making any overtures towards this being more than a casual passion project. My only experience with the professional art world is very informal local gallery shows and I don’t feel ready to change that!