Bringing up the dead.
Tonight’s construction is putting a page for my old project, The Eternal Dream Tarot Deck. If anyone is finding me out there that doesn’t know me, this is the project I’m probably most well-known for. It landed me a supporting role in the Literatarot Deck for the Museo Dei Tarrochi in Bologna, Italy. A museum for tarot decks that I still have yet to be able to visit. On the previous iterations of my site, I’ve always allowed the images to be downloaded for free so that everyone could use the deck. Now, I’m bringing it back from the grave to linger here.
I have to get the images rendered again, so that’ll be a bit of a task. It’ll be nice to have it be home again. I’m thinking of adding a button to purchase the images. (I don’t think I’m ready to print them again, and the ‘box sleeve’ I originally designed isn’t something I want to recreate.) Everyone will always be able to download them, but maybe some fans will toss a little money my way in support.
It reminds me that if you go searching for Codefreespirit on the Goog, you’ll see a lot of posts that make it sound like I developed rheumatoid arthritis and never worked again. A misinterpretation of something I said on social networks waaaaaay back when. I have gout. I do get the occasional flare up, but mostly in my feet. At the time, I had what seemed like a mystery attack of gout. I found out my grandfather on my mother’s side had rheumatoid arthritis. The doctor seeing me at the time decided to test me based on that history. The result was negative, but somehow the internet stuck with the rheumatoid arthritis story.
So truth be told: No, I don’t have rheumatoid. Just gout. I’m still drawing and creating. My biggest creative block has been debt from relationships. I’ve worked very hard to finally get to this point where I can put time into being creative and working on art again. I don’t have a studio so my medium is primarily pen and digital. I’m hoping to build from there. I’d love to get back into something like oils again, but my BIG goal is to produce narrative art. I don’t know why I don’t want to call them comics, but yeah, basically comics. Graphic novels. I seem to have a gift for visual storytelling. I think I’m better with motion pictures, but who knows, maybe animation is my next big thing.
Getting there requires money, so here I am again. At the base of why I’m here doing this. Kinda sucks to say that’s my survival goal. What can I do? Gotta feed myself. Speaking of, I originally used ChatGPT to make efficient meal plans for me. Sort of a personal sous chef or something. Eventually, I started playing a TTRPG with it, and in enlisting its help making time to put this site together, I’ve discovered it does crazy fun renders of my pen & ink illustrations. I find them so interesting, that I’m contemplating breaking my disclaimer about not selling any AI enhanced art. Maybe for a buck a piece or something. I’m not sure. It’d probably be like an alternative to my tip jar. I’m just kinda in love with the way it brings a whole different life to my art.
All for the future. Right now, it’s back to getting the overview of my site ready, and filling in the content. In the meantime, I’ll always be sending all my best vibes out there.