The King of Wands

I badly wanted to have one mad theatrical card in there - and who else could it be but the King of Wands?

Now I just know this will provoke a few comments!

Based on a make-up by our friend Vlad Taupes - wonderful work.

Two of Pentacles

Sorry to post and run - but we are just so pressed with the coming print deadline. The cards seem almost to be getting better and better though. I LOVE this one - it feeds into lots of my obsessions:

We need to begin offering giclee prints on this deck, we really do. But the giclee printer is all tied up with doing fabric prints (and full of fabric ink) and it's SO expensive to use our small printer. Hmm, must work out a solution. Some of these pictures just should be offered large and frameable - I'd like this one in a darkish hallway. Ohhhhhh yes!

The Three of Wands

Sorry it's so small. We have some computer/network problems so we are not throwing the large files around between the machines so much until it's sorted. Hopefully soon. Er - are you suddenly seeing a huge font on this page? Or have I reset my options by accident? Drat - one of those weekends computer-wise!

Albus Dumbledore was gay.

It's interesting how this is more or less spelled out (sorry for the unintentional pun) in the last book. But I, for one, missed it. Says a lot about our assumptions where sexuality is concerned: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7053982.stm

The Stolen Grimoire

Emilie Simon - Desert (french)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI_nkXUpvJk

The King of Cups

I have to admit that I really like this one.

Four of Cups

Sorry to be slow in answering the comments - just a bit up against the book deadline. But for now, here is the Four of Cups. The teeth are not very finely drawn because quite honestly they will hardly even be visible in the final card. But just to show they are there!

Nine of Swords

By the way, sorry about the copyright watermark but I'm not putting this on all the images as I've found them popping up all over the place on the web.

The cockatoo that's into Back Street Boys

I know there are a lot of these amusing animal videos going around, but this one is seriously good fun. That bird knows how to ROCK! http://birdloversonly.blogspot.com/2007/09/may-i-have-this-dance.html

Another one that hasn't quite made it to the website yet

And talking of Etsy...

I said ages ago that I would feature some sellers. Then there was a kind of Etsyscandalousblowupargumentforumexplosionthingie and I decided to wait. However, things now seem to have calmed down and I HAVE to show you this "The Bride of FrankenMonkey" It just really appeals to me - eat your heart out Elsa Lanchester!

Black cat glass beads

I feel a fool but I just can't remember who it is who has been asking me about whether we will sell some of these. I've been setting up a separate Etsy home for the Bohemian Cats - http://BohemianCats.etsy.com Rather irritatingly there is no way to really organise an Etsy shop so the cats just look a bit out of place on our main shop there. Anyway, the new shop will take ages to fill but meantime I added some listings for the beads.

The Chariot

We ended up doing this in a very classic style - I have to admit partly because we very much wanted to use the amazing Sphinxes with their bee-bodices. The mask is from the Barandov Studio collection (photographed with permission).

Three of Pentacles

In complete contrast, this is a much more explicitly narrative card. It took forever to do but I am thrilled with it ("thrilled"? Maybe that's a word that comes from looking at the expression of Dr Frankenstein here). It's hard to get the right emotion into a Frankenstein card (the monster can end up just looking laughable) but this places an interesting emphasis on the motivation of Dr Frankenstein himself I think. I know we need to do faster with this deck - but it's hard to speed it up when the cards are coming out so strong. I don't want to risk the quality and depth of any of them.

The Seven of Pentacles

We did this a while ago but somehow I never got round to showing it. It's very simple, but as there is so much going on in many of the cards, I rather like to have a few that are more sparse. I kind of like this one and it will work - in its own quiet way, nicely with the rest of the deck:

Victorian Romantic Tarot - Gold edition.

Just a quick one to say that we seem to be no, we ARE (why do I feel so tentative about this? I suppose because it surprises me a bit) down to only about two dozen Victorian Romantic Tarot Gold edition decks (from the original printing of 500). I thought they would sell a little slower than this but in fact there has been quite a rush on them this month. We're going to do a proper count, knowing us we will discover six lurking behind a cupboard or something (actually, since a major studio reorganisation in the spring we've tended to be quite good at keeping things in order) but it's that sort of number now. Sadly the shop software is not that good at keeping a really accurate count as it seems to take away and add one or two here and there entirely at whim (we need an upgrade in 2008!) Updated to add - we did the count. Twenty-six but one of those gone since, so now twenty-five. Hey, for once my guesstimate was pretty spot-on! If you would like one, please don't delay too long as we will NOT reprint the Gold.