Hiya, folks! Just wanted to give you a quick update on the Tarot of Bones. I didn’t get as many cards laid out in the past week as I spent a lot of it celebrating my anniversary with my sweetie (yay!) but I did get nine more cards done, making the total completed twenty-six! These are the newest cards I completed:

Lovers

Strength

Queen of Wands

Page of Wands

8 of Wands

9 of Pentacles

8 of Swords

10 of Swords

4 of Cups

I need to clear a couple of minor things off my plate but this weekend I should be able to buckle down more on layout. And, as always, you can see the assemblages for the Tarot cards, plus other important information, at the official Tarot of Bones website at https://thetarotofbones.com/

Hey, all! Wanted to give you a quick update. As of tonight I have seventeen of the Tarot of Bones card files completed! This is the current list:

Magician
Empress
Emperor
Justice
Hermit
Hanged Man
Sun
Happy Squirrel
King of Wands
Knight of Wands
7 of Wands
9 of Wands
4 of Pentacles
Page of Swords
6 of Swords
Knight of Cups
7 of Cups

The next week will likely be a bit lighter; my partner and I are celebrating our anniversary for a few days, so I won’t be in the studio much. But I intend to get a couple of marathon sessions in later in the month, now that I’m getting the hang of the layout. I will need to go to Seattle to have Sandra retake photos of a few of the pieces, but my goal is still to have the files to the printer by the end of October. I’m making good progress so far!

I’m also super-excited by all the near GIMP 2.0 tricks I’ve been learning. I am not a graphic designer, so I’m learning as I go. But it’s nice to be honing design skills, and I really hope you all like the results!

Hi, everyone!

So I got the green light from the printer’s tech support–the specs on the test card I sent them were A-OK! So tonight I went back into GIMP 2.6 and started laying out more cards. I finished the King of Wands and got partway through the Empress when I realized I’d made an important mistake. I hadn’t figured out how far from the top and bottom margins I was going to have the outer edges of the text. See, for the Major Arcana the number of the card (for example 0) is at the top of the card, while the name (in this case Fool) is at the bottom. And for the Minors the top would have the number or name (2 or King, for example) while the bottom has the suit (Pentacles, etc.)It satisfies my need for visual balance and makes it very clear which card is which.

While GIMP and the template I was using are both great on helping me get images and text centered (oriented toward the very center of the image) so far the only way I’ve found to have the text the same distance from the top and bottom edges of every card is by carefully moving the margins of each text box by hand (or by mouse) so that the lower edge of the lower text box is always equal with one particular tick on the ruler on the side–oh, just look aat the image below and where the arrows are pointing:

See what I’m trying to do? I have to align the text boxes by hand with those tick marks. And I can’t seem to find a way to add in pre-set text boxes. If anyone has any suggestions on how to make GIMP make this easier for me, please let me know! (No, I don’t want to move to Photoshop or another program. No, I don’t want someone else to do this for me. This is a good learning experience for me!)

Aaaaaanyway. The long and the short of it is that I have THREE WHOLE CARDS done: Magician, King of Wands, and Empress. A lot of the time I took tonight was in resizing background images; because every one of the original assemblages has different dimensions, and none of them are the exact same dimensions as a tarot card, I’m cutting the photo of each and putting it on a background to fill out the rest of the card. So the Magician, for example, is trimmed and then layered over a photo of particularly nice antelope leather. And, of course, figuring out the standard font size and placement took a fair bit of time.

But as I keep plugging away I figure I’ll be able to go faster. And tonight I’m working at something of a mental deficit since I’m sleep deprived and it’s hard to focus; more sleep will help the process.

I figure I’ll make an update about once a week on what cards are completed. I want to have the files off to the printer by the end of October; we’ll see how that goes.

So I’m really excited–I finally got to do the thing that I’ve been waiting WEEKS to have the time to do: lay out the first card and send the file off to the printer to be sure that I got all the technical details correct. This may not sound like an especially complicated task, but keep in mind I use GIMP 2.0 rather than Photoshop, and I’ve primarily used it for photo edits and simple layout for things like flyers and online promo images. So what may be a simple task for a professional graphics designer is a bit more challenging for me.

However! If it turns out that I did indeed get the layout done right, then I am prepared to make tracks on laying out the rest of the cards. I’m super-excited to be making this next step, and I’ll let you know as I get cards completed so you can keep track of my progress.

I AM going to be keeping the final card designs a secret until the deck is out. Why? One, in case I need to make last minute tweaks to designs, and two, because I want it to be a surprise! I WILL say that the cards will be fairly simple in their designs and there won’t be a white or other border, so that the art is the main focus. The rest you’ll just have to wait for.

And thank you all again for your patience and support as I keep on moving this giant project along!

My friend, Sandra Buskirk, is taking over the photography duties for the Tarot of Bones since my photography skills aren’t up to snuff for print-quality images. You can see her in her workspace in my Portland apartment; the assemblage you see upright on the table is actually “Blight: Five of Swords”, a pre-Tarot of Bones piece that was part of the inspiration for this project. By the end of tonight I should have a dazzling array of photos of all the assemblages for the Tarot of Bones, which means in the next few weeks I’ll be able to start doing the layout and image editing necessary to make them ready to print!

In the meantime, if you’d like to help make sure I can get the Tarot of Bones out as scheduled this summer, now’s a fantastic time to back the Tarot of Bones Spring IndieGoGo campaign, which ends this Saturday, April 30! You can preorder the deck and book at a discounted rate, and get all sorts of other awesome perks. And if we hit the $5,000 goal before the campaign ends I’ll let all the campaign backers in on an exclusive How To Use the Tarot of Bones video class once the decks and books have been shipped out. Head on over here to back the campaign today!