Slowly but Surely

The Chicken Tarot decks are on their way.

Hello again everyone!

It’s been a while since my last update. Quite honestly, I received the news that the cards had left the printer and begun their journey to me two weeks ago. My intention was to write an update as soon as I received the news, but that was also one day after the news of Donald Trump winning the election dropped. Sharing something so trivial when everyone I know and love is feeling understandably deeply afraid of what the future will hold felt…bad. 

In the end, the weeks spent waiting to write this haven’t really changed the news I have to share, even as the news cycle barrels ever forwards towards its next disaster…Here, in the microcosm of this little project, the cards are on their way. They are on a boat currently, and I will receive a second notification when they are a week away from being dropped off at my home. Unfortunately the time estimate I was given when they were shipped was a minimum of 6 weeks and a maximum of 8. It’s been 2 so far, so if I’m incredibly lucky they will arrive the second week of December.

If that is the case, I will work as hard as I can to get them shipped to everyone as soon as possible, knowing that many of you were hoping to give the cards as a gift to someone. 

Honestly, even if that isn’t the case, and they arrive after the holidays, I will still be working as hard as I can to get them mailed to folks. If anyone has some spare fingers to cross for me, please do so. 

In other news, I’ve been keeping quite busy. Some of the work I’ve been doing is related to this project and may be of interest. Other projects I may have mentioned off hand in previous updates, but they will have nothing to do with the chicken tarot. As these Kickstarter updates are written for the Chicken Tarot specifically, I will keep information about my other projects limited to posts on my website and Substack from this point on. Mostly just so I can feel free to write as much as I want about them without worrying that these updates are becoming tedious and off topic for you all. If you are reading this, I hope you don’t mind the world of this Substack expanding a little. I will probably need to change the title of this Substack to reflect that….I will make clear in my titles moving forward if something is Chicken Tarot related, so no one needs to read anything they aren’t interested in.

As for other Chicken Tarot updates, I am working with a local (Seattle)  printer to get stickers printed, as well as a few additional Giclee prints to add to the shop. After giving it some thought, I decided that I would really rather limit objects in the shop for a myriad of reasons. The most important of which is that I am not practiced at maintaining a shop. I don’t want to make things too hard for myself when my first priority is to mail decks to folks who have already purchased them. Once that’s managed, I’ll consider what else I think might be worth adding. It won't be the grand first opening of an online shop I had envisioned early on , but I think it will be considerably more responsible for me to take things slow. If there's one thing I've learned during this project, it's that I am a proficient painter of chickens, and an absolute beginner at pretty much everything else. 

That said, I am excited for the stickers, and really happy I found a local printer to work with who likes doing small runs for artists, and I think these samples have come out looking so cool!

I know the idea of pulling out the chicken from the sticker and leaving the background behind might be mildly irritating to some folks, but for me personally it is extremely satisfying. There will be 8 card illustrations turned into stickers. I limited my choices to the cards I thought would translate best to this style of sticker.

I have also decided to add chicken portrait commissions as the first item in my shop. Even if there are no more spots in a tarot deck for someone’s chicken, I just love painting them and hearing people’s stories about their flocks. I was inspired by the fact that I offered a chicken portrait as an auction item to a local rooster rescue (Rooster Haus Rescue, they're awesome folks!), and working on the portrait for the winner reminded me how much fun they are. Here is the portrait in progress:

The last bit of Chicken Tarot news I have is very fun, so I hope some of you have read this far. My brother is a crafting wizard, and I asked him a little while back if he would be interested in making anything for me to put in the Chicken tarot shop. He came back to me with the most adorable deck box I could have possibly imagined: it’s a little coop!

Now, my brother is one of those difficult artist types (it runs in the family) who is nigh incapable of doing the same thing twice. So there will only be one of these adorable boxes. It’s now up to me to deal with the problem of how to fairly set a price for it, which seems impossible. Part of me wants to keep it for myself...but I want it out in the world even more. The best plan I have currently is to hold a raffle for it, and donate the proceeds, but I don’t really know how to go about doing that yet, or if it’s even a good idea. All the same, I really wanted to share these photos of what my brother made with you all because it's so damn CUTE! 

Before I sign off, I would just like to say…hold your people close, my friends. Help keep each other's cups full, because the world needs folks who care. 

Until next time,

Claire