Introducing the Life Line Lenoracle
I am proud to announce that I’m launching a second deck, the Life Line Lenoracle. It’s both a companion deck to the Life Line Tarot and a standalone 3-in-1 oracle, Lenormand, and playing card deck.
The Life Line Lenoracle is a sleek deck of 54 bridge-size playing cards that can be used as a standard playing card deck, a Lenormand deck, or an oracle deck complete with messages and reflection questions in the accompanying guidebook. Each card's primary image (the Bear, the Book, etc.) is a single hand-drawn line, derived from the work of Victorian illustrator Walter Crane.
Lenormand + Oracle = Lenoracle
Even before I'd completed the Life Line Tarot, I knew I wanted to make more single-line decks. I thought I would have a Life Line Lenormand deck and a Life Line Oracle deck, but I was so in love with the playing-card style of my tarot deck that I wanted to merge the Lenormand and Oracle decks into one full playing card deck that could serve three purposes:
the Life Line Lenoracle is a full playing card deck with 54 cards (including two jokers);
it's a 36-card Lenormand deck with all of the standard symbols and attributes; and
it's a 54-card oracle deck that takes the 36 symbols of the Lenormand and inteprets them through an oracular lens providing spirit messages and reflective exercises but then supplements those with 18 more cards that can also be used as part of an oracle reading or an expanded Lenormand reading.
Inspiration
I wanted the Life Line Lenoracle to follow the general mood of the Life Line Tarot deck by using single-line imagery, but I wasn't sure what else I wanted. I liked that the Life Line Tarot directly referenced the familiar shapes and forms of Pamela Colman Smith's illustrations in the Rider Waite Tarot, so I looked at archival images of German decks for the Game of Hope, on which Lenormand is based. The imagery was pretty simplistic and, frankly, uninteresting. Creating single-line art of it would have left me with the equivalent of clip art. I considered using modern photographs or imagery as the source material, but that didn't feel right either. I knew I wanted a historical reference. I kept looking.
It was in the 19th century that mass illustrations became popular, so I scanned through collections of my favorite Victorian illustrators from grad school. They were the opposite of single-line art, beautifully shaded and made up of thousands of delicate cross-hatched lines. I couldn't do anything with that, and even if I could, it wouldn't look anything like the Life Line Tarot. Then I stumbled on a familiar name, Walter Crane.
I dug through every book of his that I could find online. There, I saw so many of the symbols of the Lenormand, and then I saw many of the symbols I'd written down as ideas for the 18 additional cards. I even found playing cards (and joker-like jesters) in some of his illustrations, as well as astrological signs, pseudo-esoteric references, and Greco-Roman myths. It felt so familiar, like really familiar, like maybe I'd known Crane and his work in another life. (Maybe I had, but I'll save that story for the guidebook.) In any event, I knew his art had to be the source for this deck.
The Art
Once I had my inspiration, it was quick work. It didn't hurt that I had vacation time planned, and we had a statewide power outage for several days that kept me at home with nothing else to do. I also created an efficient system of working thanks to the lessons of my previous deck. Whereas the Life Line Tarot is loose and free-flowing because it's a tool for scrying, the Life Line Lenoracle is much more structured. Intuition is important to Lenormand readings, but the symbols are the symbols, and in an oracle deck, the messages are the messages, whatever one sees in the cards themselves. For that reason—and because I had a new paper-like screen cover on my iPad—the lines are more refined in the Life Line Lenoracle. The deck is still made of single-line drawings done by hand (even if with an iPad and stylus), but the art was made with greater control, appropriate for the Victorians.
There are some exceptions to the general rule of single-line drawings from Walter Crane illustrations. The face cards show mirror images of a person (Jack, Queen, and King), and they also include a Lenormand symbol, so the majority of those images are single lines. They are technically composites of single-line drawings, with the person/figure copied and rotated and (in some cases) the Lenormand symbol drawn separately before being added to the image. Because of that, there was some editing and re-drawing after creating those composites to make a seamless image that isn't really a single line anymore. The card backs also include some repeated line work. There are also four images that do not come from Crane because I couldn't find anything suitable, even though all four symbols appear in Crane's work. These are the Ring, the Locket, the Clover, and the Coffin.
One thing that may seem strange for a deck of playing cards is that the spades and clubs are blue instead of black. I made that choice so the line work (in black) could still be visible if it crossed over a spade or club.
Also, there are four extra cards in the deck because there are three Aces of Hearts and three Aces of Spades. I wanted to include more gender representation in the deck—and some Victorian illustrations are surprisingly genderqueer—so I've included figures that could be viewed as representing the Lenormand's traditional gender association and as nonbinary. Although truth be told, none of the six is solely masculine or solely feminine by contemporary standards.
The Rewards
I offered Kickstarter-like reward packages and add-ons, such as stickers and sticker sheets. And I'm also offering a printed (pocket book size) guidebook pre-order for those who want to be able to pull a book off their shelf rather than pull up a file on their phone.
Technical Details
The decks are bridge-sized (2.25"x3.5"), printed on professional playing card stock with a linen texture that's covered with a special finish to make it less obvious. The decks come packaged in a simple tuck box made of 100% recycled materials.
The printed guidebook add-on is pocket book-sized (4.25"x6.875") perfect bound paperback, and I currently plan to print it on uncoated white paper with full-color ink and a matte cover.