Did Pixie do the coloring of the RWS?

Richard

I think you may be right about Pixie, TB. Bill Greer is a good example.
 

ravenest

Interesting in the concept that here she is designing the deck for Waite and they are both in the GD, but she hadn't progressed 'far enough' to have gotten to be using a Tarot deck as part of her progression through the GD. Kind of like saying "Thank you for this beautiful automobile design, Pamela, it is now in production - but women are not allowed to drive!"

Or vote - but where expected to take a large part in holding society together .... and the weirdest part ... under the rulership of a woman (Queen) figure THAT one out :confused: .... Perfectly all right back then ... women were not to know anything of Freemasonry ... but if there were not enough men tailors around, guess who made the costumes ? Also Crowley used to give his 'secret' OTO ritual and other scripts for ' a girl ' to type up ... someone even queried this and he pretty much said ; Oh, it doesnt matter, she only gets bits at a time.
 

roppo

That may be urban legend - roppo - can you help us? Once again - Pixie may have produced a large 'painting version' of a design or two 'after the fact' (she did design posters and such - not of the RWS), but painting a large piece (like the actress is doing in the video 'Strictly Supernatural' discussed elsewhere) for each card would have sucked up a lot of time.

I've never heard such legends.:D

PCS could knew the true GD tarot correspondence without achieving high grade. 777 was published in March 1909. There was a review of the book in The Occult Review 1909 July issue, which means the editors of the magazine got a copy or two of the slim volume at least by June.

Now I come to believe PCS did the color-designing of the pack, but not doing a thorough rendering. Look at the lower right end of the 6 of Wands (Pamela A). We see light blue where should have been a cloth. Someone in the printing house could not discern the figure from the background and put the light blue all over there. Such error could have been avoided if there had been a thoroughly colored original.
 

tarotbear

You know - except for maybe Bill Watterson who did his own wonderful watercolor stuff when he was writing 'Calvin & Hobbes' - the colored Sunday comics are colored by the newspaper (with suggestions by the artist); the cartoonist rarely colored them himself because printing a newspaper and printing color in a newspaper are two different processes.

Not sure how color was processed in publications in 1909; also what an artist painted and what the color process reproduced could be very different in terms of saturation or shade. What color I see digitally on my screen can reproduce quite differently on a printed page, and again can differ because of whatever process my publisher uses, too.
 

Teheuti

We can say PCS was a great hand-coloring artist. She did not trust any mechanical printing process when it came to the reproduction of color tone. She hand-colored 500 set of Widdicombe Fair, each set having 13 sheets. And she hand-colored the monthly magazine The Green Sheaf. It must have been a tremendous task. So I think the coloring of RWS was not so a hard work for her standard. The original size of the RWS illustration was 100mmx173mm. The actual printing was done by Spraig & Co..

In the BW drawings PCS left spaces for later coloring, as we see in the cloth of The Fool, or the lady's gown in the 9 of the Pentacles. In the latter case she first drew the lines of Venus signs by pen and ink, but soon changed her mind and used pencil, as we can detect in the drawing of PKT.

I believe PCS did the coloring, or color-designing of RWS.
I totally agree with you. She hand-colored things professionally and became quite accomplished at doing so. Another possibility was that she simply indicated the color areas and mixes on a mock-up for the printers to match as best they could. Basically she needed to indicate the blocks of color for their passes.

When I worked in photo off-set printing in both England and the U.S., we would use rubylith (red stick-on) and dot-screen paper (for tints or mixed colors) glued to clear overlays (one for each color run). I imagine she would have prepared something along these lines for the lithographers to follow. They would have had to prepare a separate stone for each color pass.

See my article with videos on the various processes here:
http://marygreer.wordpress.com/2011/07/13/how-tarot-decks-are-made/
 

Teheuti

I thought that there were a few large-sized original canvases of the RWS deck still in existence. Or is that an urban legend?
No. The only thing we have other than the decks themselves are the B&W line drawings that appeared in The Occult Review and a few other places (covers of some of Waite's books, etc.).
 

Teheuti

I just found a video that shows the chromolithography process - i.e., color printing. This stone technique was used for those wonderful turn-of-the-century posters like for the Parisian and British music halls and for orange box crates labels - in fact, all kinds of ornate and beautiful labels that are still being reproduced today.

http://youtu.be/E38B0swb4vo

Here's a link to images of orange crate labels that *originally* used the same chromolithography process as used to print the the RWS deck. (Later labels used newer printing techniques.)
https://www.google.com/search?q=ora...v&sa=X&ei=ve0dVJ6TOaa28wGsl4DwAw&ved=0CDUQsAQ
 

Madame

Side note

You know what's funny? When I looked into who drew the RWS cards and saw a photo of Pixie, my jaw dropped...
I look just like her. Or a LOT like her. I showed my mother and she agreed.
"It's a sign!" I exclaimed in an attempt to keep the excitement alive... as I'm creating my own deck. And reading bios on her is like reading about myself. (I hope I don't die penniless though... but at this rate I just might!)
She's half Jamaican right? Funny, I'm half black.
I feel like I've found a twin or something. :}

PS: I read that she completed the whole deck in 6 months.
And I do believe she colored them herself. Look at her other artwork. I see similarities.
 

ravenest

Well .....


just dont stand there .... post a pic of yourself so we can all see