The current state of the Major Arcana

Hi patrons!

Last month I wrapped up the last card in the Major Arcana, but I don't feel like I've completed this set yet.

Over the time I've been working on this series, a lot of things have been changing for me. This is the largest series in the collection to date and the huge amount of time it has taken to complete has left some marks on the project that I feel obligated to address before I can call it done.

The first is AI. When I started using AI back in 2021, it hadn't gone mainstream yet and didn't come with additional hazards or complications. It was a tool I was experimenting with in hopes that it would push my work forward. Unfortunately, I don't feel like it achieved the goals I had for it. What's worse is that AI has become a flashpoint for controversy, which I'm not interested in getting involved in. It's been a while since I used AI for my work in any capacity, and it's likely to stay that way due to my love for manual painting. To ensure that there is no question about the methods of work used on the whole deck, I am going back and removing any layers that used AI image generation and doing touchups on the paintings to finish them manually. Depending on the piece, those changes run the gamut from undetectably minor tweaks, to touchups, to total remakes. I'll give an example of 3 different degrees of change.

Very Little Change

Touchups

Remake

The only card seeing a remake for this reason is the High Priestess. Other than that, most of the changes are relatively minor in removing the AI side of things. This brings me up to my second reason for making edits.

I don't like all the choices I made throughout the series. Since I'm taking a beat to make edits anyway, I'm going to do some last-minute tweaks to some of the imagery. Just like with the AI edits, some of these tweaks are minor while other ones will be remade from scratch. The two I've taken away are The Tower and Justice. They've been pulled from the site and I'm working on sketches to begin them over.

The first example of a major edit I've completed is The Hermit. I started by pulling out the AI, then I pulled out the creative choices I didn't like, and then things kept cascading until I had a very different painting on my hands. I'm much happier with this piece. There are still a couple of areas of polish I plan on addressing, but I didn't want to keep delaying this update. Overall, I'm happy that I chose to make changes.

I want this process to be limited in scope and finish it as soon as possible. With that in mind, I've planned the fewest number of edits I need to make to feel comfortable calling this series complete. Here's the complete list:

Minor Edits:

• Magician
• Emperor
• Hierophant
• Death (done)
• Devil (done)
• Moon
• Sun (done)

Partial Remakes:

• Empress
• Hermit (done)

Total Remakes

• High Priestess
• Justice
• Tower

The plan is to burn through these by early next year. I want to challenge myself to take no longer than February 2024. After that, I have plans to begin the next major series in the project and I'm excited to get started!

Rather than bombard you with a flurry of updates I'll be posting the smaller updates along with the remakes as they get done. I hope you all enjoy the new work that's being done! 

Much love,

-Pete