Handy

Three hands, two heads. Finally back on a roll, I got the body and arm of the left hand boy more fully realized, fixed the outline of the right hand and repainted the background, which had become quite dirty from the repeated retouching of his face. I’ll re-establish the blues of the sky later when I’m content that I don’t need to continue working on the face. That eye still isn’t quite right, although it’s coming together at last.

I need to dig out some reference pictures of old walls that I shot in Avebury, England, where the great megaliths stand around a medieval village. I remember thinking that the people walking by as I shot them must have thought I was completely do-lally-bananas photographing walls when there were all those fantastic prehistoric stones scattered around.

I’ll paint the glow of the forehead chakra on the left hand boy and the heart chakra on the right one, following Tomberg’s suggestion that the card refers to the balance of the mind and the heart. I like the symbolism of this, which interferes little with the more alchemical interpretation I am more drawn to: the rising of the alchemical pair from the nigredo, being washed clean by the aqua vita of the sun.

This needs to dry now, so I’ll move back to the Death card.