This week, I’ve turned to a project that’s been on the back burner for a long time. I’ve been having an incredibly hard time envisioning what I wanted for the look of a finished card. Should I color the art digitally? Should I color it at all? What is the space around the card going to look like? These became such important questions that I knew that I didn’t want to continue to work on the illustrations without a direction.
I have a bunch of pencil drawings at this point to experiment with, but I have been going back to the Temperance card with regularity to try again and again to get something that seems right. Finally, I woke up on Wednesday with that “today’s going to be the day” feeling and I was right. The brainwave that I had was not some revelation about my colors, but that I was focusing on the wrong thing and that I hadn’t actually let myself play around enough with layout and the other parts of the design. Once I started this part of the work, which forced me to think about the card as a whole object, rather than just as a picture, everything seemed to get a lot easier. I will have more news on these soon, as I’m back at work with them today!