Richard
I think you may be right about Pixie, TB. Bill Greer is a good example.
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!"
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.
if there had been a THOROUGHLY colored original.
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.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.
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.).I thought that there were a few large-sized original canvases of the RWS deck still in existence. Or is that an urban legend?