In the best children's books there is a kind of wisdom that is not preachy or moralizing, but deeply connected to the ways of the world. It's my belief that this is what makes them so suitable for oracular and divination decks. Of these I have already created two: The Marvelous Oracle of Oz and The Golliwogg Oracle. I enjoy working in this format because there are not the restrictions and rules that permeate the TAROT, although I've created two notable Tarot Decks as well.
I open these mini-sites as places of their own to document the journey of creation.
Some of my earliest memories of children's stories center around Palmer Cox's Brownies. Although we never had a book specifically devoted to them, we did have in our "playroom" an omnibus of children's works that included the text and some of the pictures from Cox's Brownie Yearbook. I was drawn to the images in part because of the sheer number of distinct characters that Cox drew into each one, but also because of the calamitous situations the Brownies found themselves in -- the one pictured above is a very average example. It may be supposed that the awful "disatrophes" that the Brownies faced in every story will make for a very dark deck; I hope to avoid that, and think that I can. We'll all see, won't we?
The journey begins here.
PS ----- The design above, although completely recreated by me, is based on the box design for a child's playset of rubber stamps featuring the Brownies. What fun that set must have been! -- to be able to create scenes of your own with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Brownies filling the page -- as many as you liked!
-- Frede
