The She Can Lift a Horse Tarot is an ongoing series. To see the complete collection (so far) and to purchase prints and stickers, visit my shop.
I read Tarot for myself and friends and have found that drawing the cards helps me to meditate on their meanings and connect with them more personally.
My first deck, the Tarot Mucha, was a big inspiration for this series. In Tarot Mucha, the Devil is depicted as a beautiful woman, as opposed to the gross, gluttonous masculine figure seen in the traditional Rider-Waite Tarot. Seeing this feminine depiction not only made the card feel more relatable, but it helped me to see the Devil’s many facets: not just scary or vile, but powerful, uninhibited, and humorous. I wanted to make a deck where every card had a feminine center, where women and girls could be funny, sad, angry clueless, and everything in-between. The illustrations echo that of the easily recognizable Smith-Waite while paying homage to my favorite literary and pop culture figures. Through movie, tv, and fairy tales, it’s easy (and fun!) to see the archetypes of the Tarot in my own lived experience.
My sister has a habit of sending individual Tarot cards to the people they reminded her. I typically prop cards up in a place I’ll come across them frequently, which helps me to contextualize them differently at different times. I think Tarot is a lot like yoga: they say the real learning happens “off the mat”. The archetypes are something I think about a lot and have become touchstones in my every day life, outside of readings.
With my prints, I hope to give people the feeling of a genuine card straight out of a deck, a bit of concentrated energy for them to keep or gift to others who might benefit from it. My prints consists of a small 3”x5” card on sturdy soft gloss art paper, which is hand-cut with rounded corners, then mounted onto a thick matte cardstock. The difference in the two paper textures is subtle but effective. It’s a time consuming process, selling prints that are all all assembled by hand, but I think it’s a big part of what makes them special.
Illustration made for Mab’s Drawlloween Club 2023. This is a fun art challenge hosted by artist Mab Graves on Instagram every October. Mab assigns a Halloween-y prompt for each day of the month and everyone shares their art with the same hashtag and cheers each other on and its lots of fun.
This year I decided to connect all of the prompts into a single image. The grid format of the window panes was perfect for sharing an image on Instagram each day, with each block expanding the image one day at a time. A few of the prompts are represents by objects outside the window view, like the crycals on the window sill, and some squares contain more than one prompt.
The 2023 prompt list was:
Spooky Self-Portrait
Witch
Werecat
Vampire
Haunted
Botanical Beasts
Faerie
Mushroom
Finfolk
Pumpkin
Web
Toad
Frankenstein
Goth Moth
Reaper
Black Lagoon
Ghoul
Ominous Owl
Classic Horror
Extraterrestrial
Crow
Magic
Yokai
Nocturnal
Horned
Tower
Mythological
Hunters Moon
Wolfman
Spooky Scary Skeletons
Rest in Peace
To pass the time, I started making observational sketches during my daughter’s ice skating lessons. I find it very tricky as everyone is in constant motion, small children careen and fall and shoot across the ice like canon balls — but it’s become one of my favorite pastimes.
