Category: oracle deck

I Ching Oracle Cards with AI Generated Art (Free Download)

On By benebellIn cartomancy, create your own deck, free download, I Ching, oracle deck17 Comments

On AI Art

  • 2021 Dec. 5, How Do We Value Art? What AI art means for tarot and oracle deck publishing
    • Playing around with wombo.art
    • Is AI art indistinguishable from human-made digital art?
    • What principles determine great art?
    • Socratic & Platonic philosophy on art
    • Taoist & Confucian philosophy on art
    • Art composition: design theory
    • Disegno (Italian Renaissance)
    • Confucianist aesthetics
    • AI’s creative process vs. human artist’s creative process
    • Is AI doing a better job than humans?
  • 2021 Dec. 6, I Ching Oracle Cards with AI Generated Art (Free Download)
    • Having fun with AI generated art apps
    • AI art doesn’t “lack soul”
    • Who is the creator when it’s AI art?
    • Free download of I Ching oracle cards (AI generated art)
    • Zip files of all downloadable image files for hexagrams
  • 2022 Sep. 14, AI Generated Art + Tarot and Oracle Decks with AI
    • Personal dabblings with AI art
    • Does AI art lack soul?
    • Rising popularity of AI generated art decks
    • AI art won’t replace fine art (but may impact illustration)
    • What artists are saying
    • IP implications of AI art
    • Valuing AI generated art
    • More of my thoughts

I’ve been maybe a little bit obsessed with AI generated art apps, though not just because of the pretty art. Rather, my fascination comes from the way such AI generated art shifts my former paradigm on the mind-soul relation. Does an AI really lack soul? That’s the question I’ve been kicking around in my head.

After my blog post on How Do We Value Art? What AI art means for tarot and oracle deck publishing, one recurring sentiment expressed in the comments section on Instagram and Facebook was that the art created by an AI lacks soul, whereas art created by humans reflect the artist’s soul, and that is why human-created art is superior.

Really? Because I’m not convinced.

Continue reading “I Ching Oracle Cards with AI Generated Art (Free Download)” →

How Do We Value Art? What AI art means for tarot and oracle deck publishing

On By benebellIn I Ching, oracle deck, Spirit Keeper's Tarot20 Comments

On AI Art

  • 2021 Dec. 5, How Do We Value Art? What AI art means for tarot and oracle deck publishing
    • Playing around with wombo.art
    • Is AI art indistinguishable from human-made digital art?
    • What principles determine great art?
    • Socratic & Platonic philosophy on art
    • Taoist & Confucian philosophy on art
    • Art composition: design theory
    • Disegno (Italian Renaissance)
    • Confucianist aesthetics
    • AI’s creative process vs. human artist’s creative process
    • Is AI doing a better job than humans?
  • 2021 Dec. 6, I Ching Oracle Cards with AI Generated Art (Free Download)
    • Having fun with AI generated art apps
    • AI art doesn’t “lack soul”
    • Who is the creator when it’s AI art?
    • Free download of I Ching oracle cards (AI generated art)
    • Zip files of all downloadable image files for hexagrams
  • 2022 Sep. 14, AI Generated Art + Tarot and Oracle Decks with AI
    • Personal dabblings with AI art
    • Does AI art lack soul?
    • Rising popularity of AI generated art decks
    • AI art won’t replace fine art (but may impact illustration)
    • What artists are saying
    • IP implications of AI art
    • Valuing AI generated art
    • More of my thoughts

If you haven’t played around with the wombo.art app yet, then check out this link and have fun. You type in some keywords– any instruction you’d like to give the AI, be that themes, subjects, nouns, adjectives, colors– then choose an art style, like ukiyo-e, pastel, high fantasy, dark fantasy, medieval, etc., and the AI will generate a work of art based on your commission.

And the results are rather stunning. Human artists, in particular those who work primarily with digital art techniques, are now wondering what this means for the future of their vocation. No, not necessarily because of this app specifically, but just in general, this inevitable supplanting of human artists with AI.

More notably, I think, this is going to have an irreversible impact on tarot and oracle deck artists.

Take, for instance, these I Ching oracle card illustrations generated by the AI in a ukiyo-e art style. I typed in keywords for each corresponding hexagram, plus keywords for the two trigrams, selected Ukiyoe for art style, and hit the Create button. Then I did the design layout, added the hexagram image, number, and key phrase. Voila.

Oh, and if you’d like to download the digital image files for all 64 of these AI generated cards, go here.

Continue reading “How Do We Value Art? What AI art means for tarot and oracle deck publishing” →

Butterfly Lenormand by Mendy Dunn

On By benebellIn deck review, oracle deck1 Comment

There’s something about the Butterfly Lenormand by Mendy Dunn of The Artistry of Tarot that tug at my heartstrings. How I even came to hear about it was a bit of chance and serendipity. At the time, I really wasn’t on Tarot-Tube that often, but on that day, I happened to surf onto my YouTube homepage to look for something to play in the background while I did some house chores.

There was a tarot livestream going on, so of course I clicked onto it, and didn’t even think it through or look to see whose channel it was. And it just so happened to be a debut of Mendy Dunn’s newest creation– images from her Butterfly Lenormand.

Continue reading “Butterfly Lenormand by Mendy Dunn” →

The Ostinato Oracle: A Music-Inspired Deck

On By benebellIn oracle deck3 Comments

The Ostinato Oracle by Mellie Parkway is a lot more profound than it first appears. It combines cartomancy with musical terms, on the premise that these symbols we use in the music world connect to the collective unconscious. Archetypes in the music we create, like archetypes found in mythology, can reveal insightful aspects of our inner selves.

In its own words, the Ostinato Oracle guides you through the harmonious and cacophonous elements of existence so that you might live a gorgeous masterpiece. Come to think of it, there’s a lenormand vibe here!

This is a beautiful 43-card deck that comes in a matte finish box. The cards are gilded and there’s a bi-fold Quick Reference Guide that tucks inside the box. You can also get the full-size companion guidebook, as you see above, that gets into the musical indication of each glyph and its divinatory meaning when these musical instruction symbols are used in this way, via cartomancy.

Continue reading “The Ostinato Oracle: A Music-Inspired Deck” →

Seed and Sickle Oracle by Fez Inkwright

On By benebellIn deck review, oracle deck1 Comment

Seed & Sickle Oracle by Fez Inkwright is a botanical lover’s dream deck. There are 49 cards, where each card reads a little differently depending on whether you’re reading it as a Dawn card or Dusk card.

And thus you’ll get two guidebooks, the Dawn Guidebook and the Dusk Guidebook. Dawn is for reading about growth, investment, and nurturing something to manifestation, while Dusk is about self-reflection, self-care, or even connecting to the unseen spirit realms.

I worked with the planetary hours when reading with these cards. So for readings at the hour of sunrise, about taking action or initiative, I’ll work with the Dawn aspect, and thus look up my card readings in the Dawn Guidebook. At the hour of sunset, for meditative divination, I’ll work with the Dusk Guidebook.

Continue reading “Seed and Sickle Oracle by Fez Inkwright” →

The Lost Tarot of Nostradamus

On By benebellIn deck review, oracle deck, tarot, tarot symbolism3 Comments

The Lost Tarot of Nostradamus brings together tarot divination and the 16th century prophetic writings of Michel de Nostradamus (1503 – 1566). The better known work by Nostradamus is Centuries, which began appearing around 1555 and has remained steadfastly popular, inspiring thousands of published commentaries and hundreds of translations.

In 1558, Nostradamus published a third edition of Centuries and posthumously, a last volume of the work was published as The Prophecies in 1568. Purportedly, 58 additional quatrains exist, but couldn’t be found after his death.

Continue reading “The Lost Tarot of Nostradamus” →

Kosmos Oracle Deck by Carmen Bello

On By benebellIn deck review, oracle deck8 Comments

The Kosmos Oracle by Carmen Bello was published earlier this year and so far it’s flew a bit under the radar. And I’m not entirely sure why, because it’s a marvelous, delightful, and very accurate reading deck. The namesake comes from the Greek term Kosmos to indicate the universe as a harmonious, orderly system, a deck that will help you to regulate Chaos.

There’s a 1970s pivot-of-change aesthetic here, or at least that’s what comes across to me. The 70s was this decade of social progress in the form of civil rights and sexual revolution, individualized spiritual awakening, both coups and efforts at decolonization in many of the developing nations, genre fiction getting a spike in the publishing industry, and the hippie subculture.

Continue reading “Kosmos Oracle Deck by Carmen Bello” →

Sawyer’s Nature Portals: Animal Oracle Deck

On By benebellIn cartomancy, deck review, oracle deckLeave a comment

Ooh…this is my first circle animal oracle deck! Jamie Sawyer’s Nature Portals is a 52-card circle deck that features open portals for looking into the life of animals, amphibians, insects, birds, and marine life. The premise of the art is to capture a moment in that creature’s life, and allow us, an observer, to watch, listen, and to learn.

The cards are 100 mm in diameter, at 400 gsm cardstock, so there’s a noticeable sturdiness to them. You can really feel the intention of the portals transporting you to the animal world in that card back design. I also love that Sawyer went with a more artistic box design, rather than it being too commercial-focused.

click on image to visit Jamie Sawyer’s page

The deck also comes with a Nature Portals Companion Journal. You can buy a print copy of the journal here via Lulu.com and get the digital version of it here. The digital PDF of the journal is free with all purchases of the deck. You’ll get the the PDF upon check-out when you order Nature Portals.

The free companion journal is a 119-page full-color beautifully illustrated guidebook that labels what animals are depicted on each card, facts about each animal, keywords associated with that animal spirit, and then first-person insights into spiritual experiences with those particular animal spirits, written by both Jamie Sawyer and her mother, Gail Sawyer.

Continue reading “Sawyer’s Nature Portals: Animal Oracle Deck” →

A Lenormand Deck Showcase

On By benebellIn cartomancy, deck review, oracle deck, promotional, tarot community6 Comments

I’ll be showcasing six Lenormand deck recommendations, each one different from the others in art style. Four of them are indie and two are traditionally published. These are decks that have been sent to me and for these types of collection showcases, I typically choose only from the decks sent to me for my collection.

Let’s take a look at how the Lenormand is illustrated in six different art styles. The first is what I’ll call contemporary kawaii cutecore; the second is Western European medieval art; the third is inspired by the Italian Renaissance; then the Lenormand in a black and white Victorian illustration style via digital collage; children’s picture book fairytale art; and fin-de-siècle, rendered through digital collage of illustration works by Pamela Colman Smith.

If you haven’t jumped onto the Lenormand bandwagon quite yet and you’re interested in learning a bit more about the system, I have a nutshell summary write-up from seven years ago, here (“The Lenormand: Nutshell Summary of the Petite Lenormand, from History to Practice“).

Continue reading “A Lenormand Deck Showcase” →

A Curious Herbal (1737) by Elizabeth Blackwell: Hand-colored engravings

On By benebellIn create your own deck, free download, grimoire, oracle deck, personal, traditional witchcraft3 Comments

These hand-painted engravings of healing herbs and garden vegetables are a delight, and I’m sure at least one creative person seeing this will get ideas, download, and do something lovely with these illustrations, so here you go.

They’re from Elizabeth Blackwell’s A Curious Herbal (1737). Below you’ll find a zip file you can download of high-res images from the book. Or view it in the entirety, courtesy of The British Library, Catalogues & Collections.

A Curious Herbal (1737)

Download Zip File

About the Book:

Elizabeth Blackwell’s A Curious Herbal is notable both for its beautiful illustrations of medicinal plants and for the unusual circumstances of its creation.

[It] contains illustrations and descriptions of plants, their medicinal preparations, and the ailments for which they are used.

The first herbal was written by the Greek physician Dioscorides in the first century AD.

Elizabeth Blackwell was born in Aberdeen in about 1700, but moved to London after she married. She undertook this ambitious project to raise money to pay her husband’s debts and release him from debtors’ prison.

Blackwell’s Herbal was an unprecedented artistic, scientific and commercial enterprise for a woman of her time.

She drew, engraved and coloured the illustrations herself, mostly using plant specimens from the Chelsea Physic Garden.

It was highly praised by leading physicians and apothecaries (makers and sellers of medicines), and made enough money to secure her husband’s freedom, although she later had to sell the copyright as well.

This finely-bound copy of A Curious Herbal is from the collection of King George III, held in the British Library.

British Library 34.I.12 -13