I may have already shown these cards on this Blog but this is a newly renovated version of one of my Amber Tarot cards, freshly restored from the old slide. Roger Zelazny's "Amber" series features multiple universes, swashbuckling action, hard-boiled characters, and psychedelic visions. The plot is about a widespread royal family who can travel between dimensions and who are all fighting each other to take charge of the royal homestead, the original Reality of the world. Corwin is the hero of the story. This series was very popular in the late 1970s and I liked it too. In the story, each character has a magical Tarot card set by which they can communicate and even teleport to the location of another card in the set.
My fantasy/science fiction friends urged me to make a set of these cards, and so I did. The 17-card set went to Suncon, the 1977 Worldcon in Miami, Florida, where it was sold as a set to some folks from Kansas City. It resurfaced a couple of years ago when the owners tried to sell it, and offered it back to me for much more than I could afford.
I would love to have really good scans or hi-resolution photos of the set but that is unlikely to happen as they are all in frames. My old slides are not very good and have faded with age but if there is any interest I will re-scan the slides and restore the images with Photoshop to the best of my ability.
This figure is Corwin, whose heraldic colors were black and silver. I used Renaissance finery from the parade illustrations of Albrecht Durer for the costume design. Corwin's Tarot card is the Page (or Jack) of Swords. I did these cards when I was still a graduate student in Greek and Latin classics. The more art I did, the less I was interested in academics. This soon led to my abandonment of academia and the prestige and good living it conveys.
"Corwin of Amber" Tarot trump is ink and watercolor on Fabriano paper, 4" x 7", summer 1977.
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