Dreaming is believing, and belief is enough
The Tarot card "The Fool" signifies the invincible naivety of the beginner. Stepping into the bleak void of the unknown, the Fool trusts that a promising path will emerge right under his feet. Time and time again, the childishly hopeful mind of the fool reveals itself as a critical force of manifestation.
As the song goes:
What a fool believes,
no wise man has the power to reason away.
(The Doobie Brothers, "What a Fool Believes", Minute by Minute, Warner Bros, 1978)
My design of this card is based on my original artwork "My best Friend (Embracing the powerful goddess that is me)", which I created in January 2021.
This artwork is probably the most intimate and meaningful one I have created so far. In the winter of 2020 / 2021, I went through a very isolated, yet highly creative stretch in Cologne where I would spend my days in a very structured pattern of morning walks, physical exercise, meditation - and drawing.
For days on end, I was under the impression that whatever piece I was working on at the moment must be the best one yet - and I was probably right each time, my work kept getting better and better at an almost scary pace. But although I was eager to wrap up and conclude my first collection of drawings, it never quite felt like the end of the story, and so I kept on drawing. Until this artwork came along! The moment I finished it, I knew that this would be the final exclamation point, the last of what finally became 158 artworks to form my first art book, "Licking Lion".
I worked on this particular artwork for two days. It started as a pencil sketch, which I scanned, cleaned up and re-printed on a fresh piece of paper, from where I added pink, grey and black "Pentel" Brushpens and pastel chalks. The medium is white "Clairefontaine Paint-On Multi-Techniques" paper, which has become my paper of choice, particularly when using lots of water and lots of color layers. The size of the final artwork is 21.0cm x 29.7cm and it hangs framed over my bed.
It took me a while to get the face right, but in the end I was very satisfied with the facial expression and overall stance of the drawing, which I think conveys kindness and solace. The drawing is a self-portrait if there ever was one. I did not use any photographic references but got up from my drawing table to peek into the mirror occasionally.
While it concludes the dramatic turns and artistic development of my first anthology, "Licking Lion", the drawing "My best Friend" also articulates the very core of a new topic, emerging from this initial series: An awakening sense of a female being inside of me. The courageous and tender self-embrace depicted in the drawing is the essence of this new chapter, the spirit of the Fool embarking on a new journey - which is why I found it only fitting to start my Erotic Tarot card set with a version of this drawing.
For the Tarot card, I started from a 1200dpi scan of the original artwork, reduced it to grayscale, added transparency and re-colored the drawing using vector-graphics. I use GIMP for adding the transparency layer and Sketch for all the vector graphics parts and the actual Tarot card design. The Tarot card frame is a vector graphic element which I designed to use with all my Tarot cards. I vary the color of the "Wings" of the frame with each card to match the content. With this card, I used a custom color I named "Post-It Pink", which I obtained by scanning a pink sticky note (although it became much brighter than the actual sticky note due to the scanning). The writings on the card ("0", "The Fool", "Kruppa") are all vectorized scans of my actual handwriting. I use the "Protrace" plugin for Sketch to derive vectorized shapes from my handwriting.
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions regarding this artwork.
