Shifting Styles: I’ve given up on consistency

Hello friends, I hope you’re all having a wonderful start to the new year, and a peaceful January.

This month, we had a new moon in Capricorn, among many other planetary movements, and it should encourage the pursuit of new projects, given the workaholic natures of the astrological sign. And while energetically the month was a little chaotic, I still tried to take advantage of this new moon by giving myself a deadline to complete illustrating a full deck of Lenormand cards (36-card cartomancy system). It was my way to kickstart my creativity for the new year.

As someone who can’t really sit still, I’m always looking for a new project during my off-time from work. In December, I needed one that had enough boundaries and limitations that I didn’t need too much brain space, yet gave me the excuse to creatively explore. Since Lenormand cards are illustrations of a single object, it became the perfect exercise for experimenting with digital illustration.

While painting and other analogue artmaking methods were an intuitive process that was tactile and grounding for me (even watercolour, with all of its flowy and spontaneous glory, was grounding), I’ve always struggled with finding the same tactility and intuition in digital painting.

And though I’m definitely far from being done with the project (it’s only the 12th of January at the time of writing this), the few friends who’ve seen the works came back with the same comment:

“You changed your style.”

Yet I was immediately thinking “I’ve never had one.”