Shades of Black, White and Gray : Tarot card 15

Tarot card XV-The Devil

I tend to use a lot of Public Domain imagery in my cards, and am going to try to do better in this new year to give more credit where credit is due - Library of Congress /LOC and the New York Public Library /NYPL here!

I’ve downloaded a huge amount of imagery and put them in various folders for future use……
Having an idea already in my head for The Devil card, I pretty well knew what folders to access for imagery and initially - after first choosing what I thought of as an appropriately dramatic back-ground for them - narrowed down to about 21 to possibly use… I put them in a new folder so I could visually see the mix together to try and pick out the best matches for the back-ground…..and then chose my three main ones

Went for shades of grey, as I think that’s my overall feeling on this subject card…..
I think, really, we are our own agents - bar a catastrophe-like being in a War ,or having some kind of illness- things not of our doing- we more or less make our own personal ‘hells’ just as we go about our daily lives…

So I was quite surprised when I came up with an “Eve” image for the woman, and an unaware “Adam”-type …the wonderful operatic Mephistophicles figure was just too fitting for the background NOT to have him there overseeing it all!
A diagram of the Golden Mean -what we want to achieve/have,and mostly beyond our grasp- kind of finished off the symbolism from being somewhat quasi- religious to more simply just speculative……I hope!
l
Back-ground: Stage design of 1896 by one Adolphe Appia
Man: LOC image from 1860 by one Marconi
Woman: NYPL image from their theatre database
Devil: from a turn-of-the-last Century Russian operatic production of Faust

Shades of Black, White and Gray III : Gothic Collages

All Things Gothic Collages

I was inspired again to continue creating more old-fashioned style Gothic scenes in black and white tones, and the arches format

They are

Night at the Opera (albeit not the Bros Marx )!
The Awakening
The Meeting Place and
The Summons

All are public domain images- original stage or movie stills figures set into new backgrounds- backed by the patterned gel-layered napkin paper I made pictured behind them.

Shades of Black, White and Gray II : Gothic Arches

Bodacious B/W Gothic Arches Swap
The word "Gothic" was the approach I took for these 4-and shades of gray
Please take a moment to click on the title to see black and white work by other artists in this swap

All mixed media / photo transfer or collages with gel-layered napkin paper backs
All photos are Public Domain

The Stairs
The Assignation ( how's that for a gothic phrase )?
Angel of Remorse and
Twilight Garden

Shades of gray,black and white I

I am once again in love with Black and white...and shades of GRAY!

Victorian age swap - false daguerreotype and newly photo-manipulated photo
Depicted: Aime Millet
(1819-1891)
Millet was famous in France for his monumental sculptures. His portrait here - placed in front of one of them and aged and embellished digitally - is from an original still amazingly clear studio shot by Felix Nadar c. 1856.

Base Textures, albeit modified ,courtesy of Shadowhouse Creations/aka Skeletalmess

I have used Jerry Jones' wonderfully evocative digital textures as an enhancement to more than a few of my images since I first discovered him as FLICKRS' skeletalmess...he remains one of the most generous-minded and open community spirited artists online.

The "False daguerreotype"beside it is made as follows:

Dissolve 2 Tbs of bar soap shavings into 1/4 cup of hot water
Let cool.
Add 1 Tbs turpentine / Mix well

Print out a b/w image from your inkjet computer onto regular copy paper ( My b/w is the same image as shown in it's digitally coloured version here )
My printer is an Epson pigment-based one, I"m assuming a dye-based printer would work as well-

Paint over the picture, count to ten ,then turn onto bond or water-colour paper
Burnish well with spoon about 1/2 minute....lift it off and check it out!!