This months MtG Astrolands card has been released and like it’s companion last month, it’s Plains!
As I think I mentioned in last months blog, Maya’s insight about Leo and Cancer as sort of inverse companions (Moon/Water-Sun/Fire) gave me the idea to design them together so that they related to each other. For Leo I inverted the cool/warm color scheme, the direction of the element’s representation on the card (the river/the fiery ravine) and the location of the moon/sun. Here’s how they look overlayed:
The general concept for this came to me kind of intuitively. I wanted to do some plains that were not so much grassy fields and thought of the volcanic lava expanses you find in places like Iceland. Similar to how the image of the giant crabs from the time machine just came to me very clearly, I had the idea of a statue of some deity that also made a portal into the earth. In some of my earliest (very unclear) sketches the statue was going to be a more straightforward lion, but I decided it would be more fun (for me, personally) to make it sphinx, which has many lion features but is a kind of chimera. Sphinx and sphinx-like creatures are found in many of the mythologies and belief systems of the civilizations that built the foundations of astrology, and I modeled a lot of the design elements for this one off a variety of depictions of lions and dieties and creatures with lion aspects from the Mesopotamian region.
Human-headed winged lion found at Nimrud-Assyrian
Terra Cotta lion from Tell Harmal, Iraq Musem- Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin via Wikimedia Commons
Lion shaped bronze weight found in the Palace of Darius in Susa- Achaemenid Empire
Weirdly, and outside of any conscious intention on my part, in the novel the time machine the Traveller’s machine is being concealed underneath of a giant sphinx-like statue making a thread between the inspiration for the Cancer card and this one. I find myself stumbling into synchronicities like this all the time, and just thought that was a neat aside.
Like I think I mentioned from the start part of the design brief for all of these was to reference the psychedelia of 60’s/70’s astrology and new age art. This is probably the one that comes closest to tapping into that overtly mostly because of the way the stylized sun rays came out. Of course this is all dependent on where you live but the fact that this hot solar blasted Leo card came out during this horrible sunny heatwave where I am on the east coast feels appropriate.
In other news I have no real other news, still quietly finishing this painting series to reprint my zine by fall, almost finished with that. I sent this piece which is a few years old but has never been shown (or used for anything at all really) to NecronomiCon providence to be part of the Ars Necronomica show affiliated with the convention this summer. The show will be on view August 11-28 in Providence RI.
