One MORE Deck Hits The Table???

You know, I have two friends who did up their own deck & sold it, you'd think I would have seen the hassles they had with the thing & figured it's too much trouble, but I've had requests to do a ferret deck on and off from people for about 3 years now.....

After thinking it over the last few days (thanks to going through my indie comic book collection--thank YOU Donna Barr!), realizing my cartoon/realism animal paper dolls sell regularly, and that I can focus on a theme deck like this pretty easily....I decided to give it a try. (Horrors!) Spent 2 hours looking over framing and font styles last night, then figured sizing & title card illos. It might work, it might not, at the worst I'll have 78 spot illustrations for the local ferret rescue newlsetter!

Actually, it feels 'fun'! Not like work at all, I'm working out really basic meanings for the cards & trying to put a ferret slant on the whole thing (TOTALLY stumped for Temperance though, ferrets do NOT do moderation).

Also not sure if I should stick with more cartoony or go more semi-realistic on the ferrets. Or if they should be strictly furry or wear clothing. And whether to have the name & the basic meaning on the card, or just the card names. I do want to show albino, sable & silver mitt ferrets, and with black & white drawings, the cards can be colored in to be butterscotch & other fur colors pretty easily. But everything in the pictures will be drawn in pen & ink because I have NO clue how to use a computer art program. We have one on the computer, but it's a small program & limited. I'd prefer drawing by hand.

It'll be a fun project, no idea when it'll be finished, but hopefully only a few months (yeah, right!). In looking at the paper dolls I've done, both the cartoon & semi-realism sell very well, the main kicker in HOW well they sell seems to be how much humor is in them. The two far & away best sellers are a Xena parody with a cat & her ferret sidekick (yes, I did put a parody disclaimer on the set), and a set of dwarf Mongolian hamsters titled Hamsters of Doom. So humor definately needs to be worked into the deck to make it most appealing, to ferret owners. It's a niche market, I know, but then I'm not out to flood the market with a new tarot clone. This one will be small edition printed locally. Just something I found that I wanted to try, given how many others are doing decks & that I'm not the only one to think about giving it a shot.

I know it seems frivolous to the standard 'hard core' reader, but I've already realized that distilling a main focus down for each card has helped me look at the standard tarot more sharply (always learning!), forcing me to stay true to the theme for 78 cards without shifting art styles (always learning in art too!) and maybe, possibly, there's a small chance of getting something
that's actually publishable? Hard to tell, but if the Stick Figure tarot & the I Am Me tarot (I think that was the name) & even the Silicon Valley tarot can make it.....there's hope.

Regardless, it's just a nice project to get into & I'll see what kind of results I can get out of it. Even if they DO end up as newlsetter illustrations in the end. It'll probably be titled The Ferret Tarot -- NOT the Dook Deck or Weasel Pack as someone else suggested! (Insider ferret owner joke).

Ermine and sables, other ferrets might also appear in historical art work. The only one I found at first glance was Leonardo Di Vinci's painting:

http://www.phespirit.info/pictures/patchwork/p007.htm

The backstory is noted if you hit the information tab.

The images of ferrets in art may not be the place you want to go, but might be fun if you are looking to see how ferrets used to be portrayed. Then you could decide what appeals to you most.

The devil might be a terrier. Sounds like you are definitely having a good time.

Mari H.

I truly can't visualize a Ferret Tarot right off the top of my head, but that certainly doesn't mean it shouldn't be done! It should! (And I love the name.)
I wish you the very best of luck in pushing this deck idea to a successful conclusion. There have been many specialty decks, and many that I'm sure no one could imagine would exist until they saw it right before their eyes. For instance, I couldn't believe that anyone would combine baseball and Tarot until I saw the Baseball Tarot and realized that it was a perfectly legitimate and workable Tarot deck.
I think I could see it done as watercolor over ink, much like the Universal Tarot. I think I could also see it done as computer color over scanned line drawings.
(And come to think of it, this might be a good chance to expand your computer skills - get hold of Photoshop 7 and use it to format and color your drawings. It's not all that hard!)

If you get the chance to see the Tarot of the Gnomes, Lo Scarabeo, you'll see the the Knight of Swords ( Cav. di Spade),
riding a fine stoaty, ferrety, weasle creature - I hereby apologise for not knowing the difference - and the other Knights riding such things as rabbits, pidgeons and badgers. This may give you some insight as to which way your own ferret forms may or may not take shape.

Here's some more thoughts on Temperance : Keeping things in proportion, skillful blending of opposites, diplomacy and patience/ self control.

My advice to you as a fellow artist is simply not to bother wondering what font or size will be best, but just to get stuck in and fill a sketchbook with ideas. Then let the ferrets flow

Good luck

allibee

Ahh, but I had FUN picking them out first! I do that with all the animal paper dolls too & it's one step that I could do late at night before I got the old pencil out for the sketching side.

It also motivated me to get the cover card illo started, and for that I needed a font style to work well with it. So now that's picked & printed I can cut and past the basic frames layout to measure off the 8 1/2 x 11" sheet. Gives me the finished working size right there in front of me. The pictures will be bigger, then reduced down a tad to tighten them up somewhat.

I've located a number of historical scans of ferrets in art (helped my sister when she was doing a medieval report), and most of them are around 1560 or later (earlier is harder to find). Not enough material there to work with unfortunately. It'd be neat making it historical since I AM in the SCA & do sell at Pennsic War (yep, me, a bottom feeding scum sucking merchant & PROUD of it!) but I figured that might be narrowing the niche markets down a bit TOO much. Present day ferret owners are starved for new ferrety things, and keeping it sort of in the present will make it easier for them to like.

I've got a few sketches already. Tracked down a good skeleton picture through some veterinary connections online, and got some good basic poses looking at photos on personal sites, but the final pictures will be all 'mine' when it comes to line drawing. I'm looking forward to doing the Queen of Cups, that mother instinct combined with 5 screaming kits in her arms & that patient mother look..........ok, just one aspect that card could take. I'm going to make a point of doing one with the weasel dance (all ferret owners know what this is) and a box of raisins may find it's way in there too. The Tower could go several ways, as can the Hanged Man (ferret?).

I used to do mail art in the past, had a re-curring cat character and fox who started doing a parody on Xfiles & all sf movies I could think of. My pen pal countered with her Rottweiler as Obi Wan Sarabi in the sand dunes.....we kept it going as a story line for close to 4 months, so the cartoonish aspect won't be hard to keep to.

(Oh, the I Am One tarot wasn't the one I was thinking of, what WAS that black & white drawn deck where the lady has a hand mirror in front of her face & the words "Who Am I" written on it? THAT'S the one I was thinking of.)

Wish I could direct you to a site showing some of my paper doll animals but the one they were on was taken down when the lady went back to college.......she had most of mine up there. They all had people costumes & stood on their back legs, yet looked like animals, not anthropomorphic creatures. Fine line there, I know, but I'm not trained in anime & that style is nice but not exactly what I've gotten into.

I'll try posting some of the pictures up on Picturetrail when I have them, so you can see.

Wow - cool! Not really a ferret fan but I can see this as being really funny. I would say, go for 'realistic cartoons' I don't know your style but I think that fairly realistic would be good but with, maybe, humanistic expressions and clothing? Could be a winner. Try out a few different styles and perhaps show the samples to a range of people, tarot lovers, ferret lovers and people who don't know anything about either... See which appeals to them most. But if you are doing it just for fun, do the style that you enjoy most.

I hope you get some stuff on the net soon - can't wait to see!

As a closet ferret fan in denial, I'd love to see this deck. My opinion is there's plenty of room in the world for more tarot decks no matter how many get made- like stories, the knowledge and entertainment tarot provides us is potentially infinite.

Laurel

A closet ferret fan in denial????

I spent 3 hours sketching ideas last night. I'm REAL happy with how a lot of them turned out, but already tossed 5 or 6 sketches. Still, that leaves me with a good start.

Got good images that might need a bit more tweeking, but the rough sketches are there already for:

Empress (though this one turned out a bit more Chuck Jones than I wanted.) The Moon, The Sun, The Devil, The Hanged Ferret (went with 'less is more', he's swinging through the top part of the card, upside down, maybe NOT under his full control--but then ferrets generally aren't, and I'm trying to give this a ferrety slant).

King of Cups, Queen of Cups, 2, 3 & 8 of Cups

King of Coins, Ace, 2 & 4 of Coins, Page of coins

King of Swords, 3, 5 & 9 of Swords (LIKE this one!)

King of Wands, 2 of Wands (I LIKE this one!), 5 of Wands

They're all pretty rough right now, but this seems to be a pretty good start.

The plus side

HudsonGray said:

Regardless, it's just a nice project to get into & I'll see what kind of results I can get out of it. Even if they DO end up as newlsetter illustrations in the end.

(((((((Go for it))))))))

It would be totally original and one for the rare collectors.

Click to expand...

Boy, pricing around for xerox reproduction on card stock (both black & white and in color laser print) really has a wide variety of prices. Office Depot has the best, so far. 18 cents per 8 1/2 x 11" card stock page, plus 6 cents more if I want to run them through for putting an image on the back of the cards.

But when I looked at paste up on a single page, I can't do 8 cards per page, the machines cut off 1/4" down one long side, so half the border ends up missing. If I shrink it down 5% that eliminates that, but the cards look too small then.

So I'm going to do 6 cards per page, which ends up to be 13 pages per deck.

There's card stock in 11x14" size, but it's only half as thick. NOWHERE near the stiffness I want. I'm also not going to do them on plain paper & laminate, that's over an hour of work for each deck done (I was thinking of printing up 20 or so).

Best paper I could find was at Kinkos on what's called executive card stock, which is thicker than the standard AND has a great subtle speckle to it & comes in a light cream, tan, grey and a darker leather color (that's too dark). BUT it's 30 cents a sheet plus the 7 cents per side for printing, basically 44 cents per page. Costs add up fast when you're looking at 13 pages per deck.

The sketches are coming along great. I think to keep costs down I'll be going with the lower end pricing, and (horrors) adding the basic meanings down the side of the card. Looking at the costs of doing a little white book as well...................... I'll stick with the standard Rider Waite meanings & call it even. This means no box either, but I've seen home made decks that are tied with a thin ribbon & sold that way in zip lock baggies.

I'd love to do a color deck, but Kinkos said I'd need 150 pages to bring it down to about $11 a deck for printing costs. Sure, if I was going to sell them for $50! No chance of that! Naw, black & white it is. Let the buyer color them in if they want to.

The borders are done & I've got a great font that matches the pen & ink style. Yes, HAD to do the borders first so I could see what the final space size is in the card for the illustration.

It's progressing!

Now if I wanted a 'mini-deck' that would be interesting, but the font style for the words is too hard to read that small. (But it would be a SNAP to color in!).