The coloured cards in the suit of Cups without the Courts……
One tiny piece is left uncolored, I will do it later…
Have a nice day!
The Suit of Cups – coloured
Category: Aces
About the plant based paint I use for colouring my Hes cards
In the last post I showed the difference between the two Aces of Cups I coloured with commercial paint and my own natural one. In this post I would like to write about this process a little bit more ..
It is only February, so there are not many plants we can use for painting. My choice for blue was common or european privet (ligustrum vulgare), probably some late elderberries would have been better, but I could not find any…
Green was made from goldenrod (solidago canadensis),that I always dry and store for the winter as a herb. It makes a greenish yellow , a beautiful one on wool, but here I mixed it with privet-blue to have a more greenish shade.
blue made with common privet
my privet-blue hand and some samples of green paint made of goldenrod
There is a very pale red here , but as you can see in the next photo madder (rubia tinctorum) root can create a much vibrant red as well.
To produce plant paint for using it on paper you need some other “ingredients”, like gum arabic, or other gum from wild cherry tree or even from fruit bearing trees from your garden, although they can make your colours darker.
And I put some alum as well into the final mixture, to make the colours more shiny and it preserves them as well. Although for this reason I dry them so to get a fine powder.
As I mentioned in the previous post I have to find a way how to preserve the wood-cut look. Well , I have some ideas but about them I will write in one of the next posts:).
Have a nice day.
Painting naturally – first attempts
I have been dyeing my home spun yarn and wool with plants for a couple of years. Here you can see some of it….
….but this is my first experiment to use plant based paint on paper. Well I re-drew the Ace of Cups from the Hes Tarot, and painted it with natural paint this time:
I prefer the second one with the plant paint, – the colours are much more vibrant – but I see that it is far from perfect. First of all there are white lines around certain areas, where the two colours meet, so I have to concentrate and pay more attention while painting on the edge of the colour patches. The other consideration is that I should use lighter colours otherwise the “wood-cut-lines” will not be visible. So one layer of my plant paint is enough:)
In the next post I will share some thoughts about the natural paint….
Clouds or ruffles
….. looking at the Ace of Swords and Batons.
To compare:
The WS card and the Hes -Tarot depicts clouds, this is where the hand with the actual symbol emerges from. Not so the CBD or even other Marseille decks. It is interesting to note, that there is an other difference , namely, that around the “clouds” we can see an area that symbolizes radiating light. The colour of the clouds is blue, while the “light-area” is yellow….. Soon I will be able to post an image about my coloured Ace of Swords:).
Which one is the original, or rather the first step in this evolution:)? Well , on the Noblet Ace of Batons we can see a ruffle sleeve and on the Dodal as well….. So maybe the original image was that with the ruffles , a more down to earth approach….
Re-creating the Hes Tarot 