My 6th MtG land card was released at the end of last week and it’s Gemini/Mountain! This is a high pressure sign for me, because many of my favorite people are Geminis. There’s something about certain assignments where your mind gets stuck on one track for a very long time, and this is one of those. Twin/mountain just kept taking me to two mountain peaks and stopping there. It was sort of too literal and obvious to get my mind off that path for a while.
This is a sign I’ve always found a little puzzling because the icon/mythology is the twins (often associated with Castor and Pollux but also the Vedic Ashvins) but the characteristics usually have to do with changeability and dichotomy, so they are clearly not meant to be taken as identical or interchangeable. I was talking to my #1 Gemini Roxy and she pointed out that maybe this is because while Castor and Pollux are twins, they do have different fathers and as a result one is mortal and one is immortal. Maya’s guidance was about representing the twins as the same but legibly different, two sides of the same form, and my mind went to something more along the lines of tragedy/comedy masks. This gave me something to play around with and led me to the temple faces on the peaks, since I particularly like making hellmouth type designs. Like I mentioned when I wrote about the Aquarius/Island card this is an air sign and all the air signs have similar skies, since it’s the hardest element to represent in some tangible way. The temples are also meant to be positioned in the way that the twins heads are when looking at the constellation at certain angles.
This ended up being one of my favorite cards when it was finished, and it’s a part of a streak of illustrations I’m really proud of, so I’m excited for the next couple to come out. I still haven’t put the prints of this one or Taurus on INPRNT yet (oops) because I’m going to resize all the prints I have up. I saw the print a friend got irl and inprnt adds such a large additional border that the image becomes quite small. So the good news is once I fix this if you order the smaller size it will probably be about as big as the “large” size was before. I still have my own bigcartel with prints and zines btw! Also you can book a reading with Maya! If you want to see the new stuff I’m working on follow me on instagram, I have a few new paintings in progress right now. This is not my most interesting entry but honestly, it is very hot out right now and I can’t think.