Sketching the Tarot

My favorite part of making The Molotov Tarot is probably the very beginning of each card, when I sit down and sketch it out.

I've been looking back to Pamela Colman Smith's illustrations for the Rider Waite Smith Tarot. I don't want to recreate her cards, because mine carry a certain personal narrative, but I love using them as a starting point and then figuring out how the scene exists in my own world.

I've also been using the deck as an excuse to learn more about perspective, especially one point perspective. Drawing rooms, buildings, roads, furniture, medieval spaces and all the places these characters have to exist has forced me to think much more about depth and environment than I sometimes have in my other work. I really love that part of it. The sketch is where I get to build the little world before I worry about making everything beautiful. All in graphite and with rulers. I also love the discipline of restraint and how important it is to get all of the details, the symbolism and nothing else.

The more I've worked on the tarot, the more interested I've become in Pamela Colman Smith herself. Her illustrations for the Rider Waite Smith deck were published in 1909, but there is something about them that still feels incredibly modern to me. SHE’S incredibly modern to me, just look at her wiki if you dont believe me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Colman_Smith They're unworldly and weird and almost deceptively simple. The figures can feel theatrical and somehow that makes them more interesting rather than less.

I think that's part of why I've become so attached to her drawings. They feel alive. They feel, for lack of a better word- magical. The symbolism is obvious and not at the same time. Sometimes they're beautiful and sometimes they're honestly kind of bizarre.

And more than a century later, we're still looking at them.

That's amazing to me.

Humbly I go on drawing my tarot and really it is a total labor of love and I can’t wait for you to see the whole thing. xx