Card Spotlight: The Lovers
The Lovers represents choice: breaking away from what is expected, following our desire to a state of love, to a valuable, lasting, supportive relationship which leads to a new understanding of life.
Our Lovers are Sai and Yamanaka Ino. The meanings of the card are perfect for the pair. When Sai was captured and under a genjutsu Ino used her family jutsu to delve into his mind and help resolve his inner crisis and his loneliness; their mutual trust and support begins there, and Sai grows from a seemingly emotionless Root agent to an integrated self. Eventually they marry, with Ino going against people's prejudice to do so.
The Lovers was designed and created by @sevenhelz, also the main co-ordinator of the event. He says: "I didn't know much about tarot previously, but when The Kiss occurred to me as a base for The Lovers I thought it would be beautiful. I asked @vinniebean about the symbolism I should include and realised that the Tree of Life is another well-known Klimt piece from his gold period; the tree I've drawn is a little thinner, but it follows the patterns pretty clearly. I used some of the flowers from that painting below the tree in the flower meadow, which is otherwise drawn directly from The Kiss and only very slightly supplemented with flowers inspired by other Klimt paintings and patterns. The Tree of Knowledge is my own design, based a little bit on apple trees, but instead growing Chakra Fruits - here I collaborated with @chipeurtheshipper, who created Kaguya as The Devil, to design our fruits similarly. The snake design is flipped from Klimt's Hygieia, and the trunk of the tree behind the snake roughens into a snakeskin pattern inspired by Klimt's Water Snakes paintings.
Other details came from the original character design; the hearts on Ino's dress represent the shape of the hand sign she uses for her family jutsu, and the tiny snakes and mice on Sai's clothing refer to his ink animals. Sai typically wears black and grey with a little red highlight, but Ino wears a lot of purple, so I applied artist's prerogative and gave them both purple clothing. It wasn't obvious to me before, but there are sections in the middle of them which could belong to either character, and I wanted to retain that sense of them being so close as to almost be conjoined.
The last point to note is that that the flames of the Tree of Life are drawn directly from the symbol of the Will of Fire in Konoha. I was delighted to realise how neatly the concept lined up.
It was obviously important to me to include a lot of fine detail, which was quite tricky given the size of the piece. I normally outline my work with either paint pen or fineliner, but either of those would have limited me here; Ino's spirals and the linework in her dress are so close that paint marker would destroy the piece, and fineliner doesn't take well to being wetted so would've limited my options for colouring thereafter. I decided to outline with (very sharp) coloured pencils, which gave me a great range of colours to choose, and then I filled with watercolour pencils. I love the "painted" effect watercolour pencils can give, and although it softened some of the linework as I painted, I'm really pleased with the outcome overall."
Well done @sevenhelz; give yourself a pat on the back.