This one went through a couple of different versions. On the one hand, this was a case of not knowing what to do with the card until the right idea presented itself. But even after that happened, and I latched on to Harry Houdini as being the obvious choice for my Hanged Man, my first version of the card just Did Not Work. The upper body was too open in its pose, and Houdini's head did not work on the body. Sometimes a Frankenstein monster just refuses to get up and walk. Or in this case, hang right. I tried adding a loose straight-jacket dropping away in the lower right corner, to indicate that Houdini was in the moment of escape; it looked nice, but it didn't fix the card and as my friend and mentor Carrie Paris pointed out, the symbolism was not right. Dr. Frankenstein got to work again, sawed the upper body completely off and subbed in Houdini's own torso in chains. I still had to change his head, however. In the image that I was using, Harry was giving a stern up-from-under look that didn't work for me. I used a different head from a different photo that was obviously taken in the same session. It fit nicely. Once again, the background is taken from one of my mother's ex-collection of folk art paintings, blown up and heavily processed. The circus pole that Harry is dangling from is the same one in the circus ring in my Heirophant card. The rope follows the lines of the original photograph, but had to be re-done, re-textured piece by piece because it had whited out to nothing in the processing. I'm pleased with Harry's halo of Illumination, which is a bit of circus tent pattern that has been Magically Altered in a variety of ways.
Hope you like the card! As always, I can be reached at duckmeister[at]ducksoup[dot]me if you have any thoughts!
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Freder
www.ducksoup.me
