Proofing for Print

Hello again everyone!

I’m back with another update on the Chicken Tarot deck, with a few associated thoughts on editing, and just a dash of what I’ve been up to lately.

In my last update, I left you all with digital mock ups of the deck. These were exciting for me to see, and bringing things together like that really helps when I’m making decisions about all the seemingly disparate details I’ve been chipping away at.

I wonder though, do those digital mock ups undermine the excitement you might experience when I share photos of my first printed mock up? I hope not, because on this side of the screen, being able to hold, shuffle, and pull a card from a full 78 card deck feels unreal. It sent my mind spiraling back to the first cards I had printed of the Major Arcana last year. As proud as I was, there is something distinctly dissatisfying about pulling cards from an incomplete deck. Having the whole deck in it’s almost final form is a bit of a relief really.

Before I get caught up in musings about the past year and how far this project has come (because it’s not finished yet!), let me share some photos and talk about what I learned from handling the test print.

This deck was printed by a different company than the one I plan to use for the actual print run. This means that I can only learn so much from it, especially in regards to production quality. The reason I went with this card printing service was simply because they can print one-offs very quickly. I needed a physical deck of a reasonable quality mainly to test the….user experience? I’m sure there’s a better word for it, but in short I needed to get my hands on it to see how the deck felt. Here are a few of the things I learned from this test print:

• Many cards and the box printed darker than intended. (This is pretty common, as screens are back lit, but I still forget about it all the time…)

• Some of the very saturated colors needed adjusting to print correctly.

  (This was especially true for the Moon card, which is a bright purple on screen, and tends to wash out in print.)

• I really don’t like a glossy finish on the box, so I will probably go with a soft touch matte finish. (That can dull colours, so I’m still considering if its worth it.)

• Overall the colours of the box, back, and cards all work well together, which I’m very pleased with.

• The sunflower/chicken eye lines up with the thumb cut in the box, which I think is fun. It may not actually be packaged like that…but regardless, that little detail tickled me.

So after receiving the deck, I went through every piece and made editing notes. Mostly this turned into splitting the cards up into two piles: colour correct or colour incorrect. Then I went in and actually made those edits.

Once that was complete, I printed out the box, card back, guidebook, and all of the card faces myself, and made a fresh round of edits. I love being able to look at something and write on it while editing. I feel more alert when I do this.

This reminds me of one other thing I try to keep in mind while editing; my mental state. Having “fresh eyes” is super important, and I will often come back to something over and over just to find that one thing I missed the first two times.

Fiddling to find the right words for the guidebook.

Personally, I don’t think of myself as having a great eye for detail. This might be one of those self-deprecating things that people say when they are overly invested in perfecting a skill, but I’m gonna say it anyway. My remedy for catching details, whether I have an eye for them or not, is repetition and ego-death. The repetition comes in with doing multiple rounds of edits, as previously described. The ego-death (yes, I know it sound incredibly dramatic) comes in when you invite other people to edit your work. Because here’s my real problem when editing: I don’t want there to be anything wrong with my work. I don’t want others to see the mistakes, and I certainly don’t want to have to fix them.

Alas, mistakes are inevitable, and fixing them feels a lot better than leaving them in.

So, as I type, I have foisted pdfs onto a handful of trusted folks willing to help me edit. I will bother a few more, but I am very very close to having everything ready to be sent to the printer. It’s a touch intimidating to be so close to such a significant moment in this project. I feel almost certain that the printing company is going to get back to me though I’ve done my best to follow every guideline laid out on their site.

As nervous as I am about sending the files to be printed soon, I confess the part I’m actually scared of about is mailing everything out once it arrives. Of course, I’ll simply cross that bridge when I come to it…

Back to the present: Once I send the files off to be printed, I will share an estimated timeline on their arrival as it’s shared with me. During that time though, I have a few fun chicken tarot related projects I planned. One very significant project will be creating an online store for the Chicken Tarot decks, and a selection of prints as well. If anyone has ideas or suggestions for related products they’d like to see in this store, please feel free to comment below.

On a related note, I have taken the illustration I designed for the box and listed it as a pattern on Spoonflower. I wasn’t entirely sure how else to make it available to people for use, and this seemed like the simplest solution. I even ordered a bit of fabric myself, and I’m very excited to share what I end up making….

Here are a few other things I’ve been up to recently:

• I made a short but sweet visit with my family in Michigan, where I played three delightful tabletop roleplaying games at RFT-con. This is a day long gaming convention put on by the creators of the podcasts Roll For Topic, and Splatbook, the latter of which my brother is now a co-host of. I also played pickleball with my mother, who thoroughly trounced me and gave me lots of helpful tips. A true coach never retires.

• I created some very unusual pieces for a group show called "What You Bring to the Table". My friend Alaina (who may very well be responsible for the existence of this Kickstarter) wrote a lovely post about it here.

A character I sketched while I played them in a fantastic game of “Corp Borg”

• I caught the baking bug upon my return and decided to make this autumnal Bakewell tart. It has Hazelnut frangipane on top and a spiced apple jam on the bottom.

• I have also taken my (now annual) crack at creating the best pumpkin spice caramel sauce to put in my coffee. I think this was a very good first effort, but an experimental change in the order I added the ingredients took it from caramelized to slightly burnt. I think I’ll have it perfected with one more attempt.

It’s still pretty damn good if I do say so myself…

For those of you who bake and want a recipe, it is at it’s core just home made caramel with pumpkin spice and puree mixed in. My hot tip from this most recent batch is to add the pumpkin puree last. I tried blending the cream and pumpkin puree together to make it smoothe and more homogenized, but if you do that, add plain cream to the caramel before adding the cream you blended with the pumpkin. That’s what I plan to do next time. You can also just skip the blending and add the cream first and the pumpkin puree at the end.…sorry, this is not a structured recipe at all is it? Good luck!

For those of you who don’t bake but love a pumpkin treat, have you ever made whipped cream with pumpkin puree, sugar, and pumpkin spice in it? If you can make whipped cream, you can make pumpkin whipped cream, and you definitely should do that. Put it on top of your coffee, hot chocolate, chai, eat it straight, whatever does it for you.

On that very silly note, I hope you are all doing well, and I’m very excited to update you again soon!

Sincerely,

Claire