[Title card]

The Uncarrot Tarot

Now this is a very old project.

I'm not sure how old I was when I drew these cards. Possibly twelve or thirteen. I know I had them with me during my second CTY session, but I'm not sure what year that was, either. Hm. I was drawing Moopsball hammers, which I didn't learn about until ninth grade, so perhaps I was as old as fifteen. It couldn't have been later than that, however.

I decided to draw a Tarot deck. Everybody should. I had just figured out shading of curved surfaces, and the idea occurred. How long could it take, anyway? Drawing two or three cards a day?

Well, I wound up with 93 cards, so I guess it took a couple of months.

Materials: a stack of 4x6 index cards, cut in half, and a mechanical pencil. Also an eraser, although not a very good eraser. I later sprayed the cards with fixative, but I didn't do a great job of that either. I treat them gently. They couldn't stand up to real use.

The cards are full of the symbolic allegory of my youth -- or something. Really, the memes that I was enthusiastic about back then. The Elvish alphabet; computers (meaning 1983 computers); tropes from science fiction. The four main suits are Hammers, Disks, Pencils, and Silly Hats.

I couldn't draw people (and I still can't). With the exception of a couple of hands, there are no human forms here. Instead, I blatantly ripped off Tom Wham's cartoon characters from the board game Awful Green Things From Outer Space. (From TSR then, Steve Jackson now. See also AGT fan page.) They were easy to draw, okay?

(This probably makes the Uncarrot Tarot the largest collection of Awful Green Things fan art in existence. Unless someone is even stranger and more obsessive than me.)

Possibly related sites. The theme for the day is "quickie black-and-white pen-or-pencil artwork".

Last updated July 7, 2002.

The Tarot Art Tool Project, a completely separate Tarot project which I started much later

Zarf's SVG Tarot, another completely separate Tarot project

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