https://www.namesakecomic.com/comic/namesake-tarot-the-high-priestess

New comic!

This week, all my thumbnails were bad! We have about 5 pages left in the chapter with some pretty complex visuals, but nothing was looking the way I wanted to, so I took a little illustration break. As some folks may have seen on social media, I think I was also discouraged a bit to work due to some mail and merch troubles. Nothing like border control tossing all your con sticker stock into an abyss to make you want to take a nap.

I really love drawing the cast in Tarot cards, and here we have Emily Gale as the High Priestess, the second card in the major arcana. Usually, these cards feature a woman between two columns, holding a scroll and wearing a crown with a moon crescent on it. For this design, I nixed the crown but kept some of the symbols from the original card, such as the pomegranate, the palm leaves, and the moon, and mixed in some Namesake symbols thru the vines, the vorpal, and the tornado. Emily is holding a book and a smith's hammer, the two tools she worked with in life - knowledge and craft. In this version of the card, the columns and respectively made of vorpal and organic matter, to represent all that she built during her life, especially the work controlled by Henry, where she had to use bones and bodies. The tornado is her greatest work, and is central to the piece. Henry (in his Henry Gale shape) is on one side, Dorothy on the other, in the background. The two people with the biggest influence on Emily's life. The moon represents her twin sister Emma.

This card represents intuition, wisdom, and hidden knowledge. This all works with Emily, who is both a character who had to work with her intuition, but is also the keeper of great knowledge. She's also an adoptive single parent, which is a more emotional role compared to her vorpalsmith one. Inverted, it can mean disconnection, secrecy or hiding one's true self, which is evocative of the time she spent under a shadow's spell.

I am pretty excited to finish this chapter, and I'm glad I got to do a nice Emily illustration before the story moves on from her journey, because she is such a captivating character.

Isa

https://www.namesakecomic.com/comic/namesake-tarot-the-high-priestess