The Dark Beach

As some of you know, I quite enjoy making card decks. Or at least, I like to begin making card decks, since the momentum usually collapses pretty quickly and they end up getting stored in my ever-growing archive of the incomplete. However, I recently put together two Instant Oracle's, which I did finish; one for myself, and the second for a friend. Completing my friend's copy gave me a feeling of satisfaction, because I realised that I can reach the other end if I push myself. It involved a lot of cutting, sticking, and laminating, but it was worth it.

A couple of years ago, I began an oracle called The Dark Beach. It had originated in a project I had started at work. While fishing through the new fashion trends for the season, I happened upon a visual mood board for boyswear on a prediction site. It was a surf story with an uncharacteristically edgy, dark, and grungy feel to it. It might have been inspired by the tv show Lost or it could have been born in something much earlier, such as The Lord of the Flies, but wherever it originally grew from, the idea captivated me and began to take further shape in my mind. I put together a print style board for my portfolio entitled Beach Boy, working with a palette of rustic browns, oranges, deep greens, and dark surfy blues, but The Dark Beach wanted to stretch itself further than prints for little boy's t-shirts and shorts. This was when I started to put together images for an oracle.

The images I have used for The Dark Beach are from many different sources. Most have been found online. Once retrieved, they have been heavily manipulated in Photoshop. For the backgrounds in my cards, I took what were pleasant coastal pictures and changed them into desolate and foreboding landscapes. The Dark Beach is symbolic of the deepest and darkest places within our mind, heart, and soul. Not all of such places are pretty enough to make sandcastles. I then collaged many of the figures onto their backgrounds, playing with scale and cutting away what was not needed on the computer.

Quite recently, I watched a few videos on You Tube about Soul Collage. In thinking that it might be something I'd enjoy doing, I thought back to The Dark Beach and realised it was something I'd already invested a great deal of time in. I looked back at the work I had completed from the deck and realised that it was the kind of pack I would buy if I saw it in a shop. With that, I decided to print it out, laminate it, and get to work with using it.

So far, I have near to thirty cards. I plan to do more, but for now, they are workable enough as they are. The cards are borderless and the colours are both dark and rich. I laid a few cards on my bed this afternoon and realised that they easily touch some place within. Maybe this is the strength in creating your own cards. Even though I have nicknames for some, I have left them titleless, since there are a multiple of different ways that they can be viewed and interpreted; in that way, they are similar to the Soul Card packs byDeborach Koff-Chapin.



Illustrations from The Dark Beach Oracle by Prince Le Normand