The Making of: The Letter

©McCracken & Worthington

There were quite a lot of questions in my head when I designed the Letter card.  What sort of script should be used?  What sort of medium: paper/papyrus/ogham sticks?

My choice in the end was to show a scroll and ogham script, for a number of reasons.  A scroll, because there were a lot of them in use at that time, and it is more obviously a Letter than a stick with scratches on it.  And ogham, because it was used a lot by the Celts as a way to hide what they were writing. 

They would transcribe whatever language they were writing into ogham text as a sort of cypher, to keep it from being easily read if found by someone it wasn't intended for.  So, you find ogham texts which, when returned to the regular alphabet, are actually in Latin, or Gaulish, or Ancient Irish, and so on.

©McCracken & Worthington

When Will started work on the brief, he asked me what the Letter should actually say.  It wasn't something I had really thought much about, but he assured me that some of his fans would transcribe the text, so it should have some meaning.  Took me a while to figure out what to put, and it's in Ancient Irish, as I preferred the idea of a letter going between Celtic Brittany and Ireland, to one written in Latin.  If you want to know what it says, you'll have to be nerdy enough to do the cypher yourself!

Another factor in my design was that I wanted different forms of light in the different cards.  So, the Book shows sunlight piercing the gloom of a roundhouse's interior, while here the scene is lit by a rough, beeswax candle.  And then, the outdoor scenes are alternately by sunlight, starshine or moonlight.  The single candle is more intimate than sunlight, and suggests the light of the mind that has crafted its text...