!! Thank you so much! 😭💞

Thank you for making an art share, I'm excited to meet new folks! My name is Em, I make high-intensity painting and illustration. I illustrated and published a tarot deck last year and I'm looking to make another! bsky.app/profile/thes...

you found. the EXACT thing I needed. oh my god thank you!!!! now I can LOCK IN

Also open to non-crunchy soft music, I need different textures for different kinds of work which is funny to type out but true

!!!! oooh this has delicious crunch THANK YOU

...this is what bandcamp is FOR, right

Also preference for lower register+pitch. I struggle with high-pitched sounds unfortunately, I have the ears of a nervous animal.

Yeah, it’s exhausting. I have a constant steady stream of emails from people asking me, “Hey this person is trying to sell me the indie version of your deck, is this legit?” (It NEVER IS. It never once has been!!!)

this minirant brought to you by my clownish rookie mistake of "oh, i wonder if there are any cool decks on Kickstarter, it's been literal years since i looked" (it was all AI)

also this trend of naming the author before the artist, or not naming the artist at all? on a TAROT DECK? the visual medium?! has got to stop. be serious.

...this is also how I found out that one of the references I came across has articles dating from now to back until...the 1870s 😵‍💫

I've done a couple of library trips, a bunch of books from my own personal library, a lot of free writing and sketching, and also just trying to let the thoughts form and connect in the natural way, and it feels good. It feels like what this is supposed to be.

I learn so much in the manual freewriting time. I learn SO much in the messy sketching time, in going to my local library and poring through a limited section of books. That discovery portion is so important to me, it helps me start picking out threads and figuring out what I'm weaving together.

Something that I've really been emphasizing as I put this together is the JOY of manual research and planning and organizing. There's so much AI slop everywhere with people crowing about how it makes making big art projects easier, and I feel like I'm plugging my ears and going "NO."