I recently finished the original art for a series of tarot cards, and now I feel like my cat Meisa when she jumped into a place where she didn't fit very well. My friend and I, who asked me to join in his vision of making and marketing the cards, are in the difficult business of trying to mutually find the right words to both honor the original enthusiasm of our working together, and to create a business relationship. I think maybe we didn't think before we jumped in, or maybe we made assumptions about what we were going to do once we got there, only to discover that the "there" wasn't anywhere we knew.Of course it would have been vastly preferable to have written a contract before we started the project, but it seems that us humans are like curious cats: with no pre-planning--into the cage we go.
On the advice of a sister artist here on Cortes Island who has recently created illustrations for a children's book, I contacted the Canadian Artists Representation Copyright Collective. What an education I have been receiving! I didn't explain to my friend that my wanting royalties meant I was retaining reproductions rights, and my friend didn't understand that reproduction rights are not automatically included in the sale of original art work. Hopefully we will be able to jump out of this situation together with the same good will we had when we jumped in--but in the meantime we are stuck sifting though words like bird seed, trying to find the ones that will nourish both of us equally.
Even though creating, publishing, and marketing my own Journey Oracle card deck has been at times frustrating, at least the place I jumped into had to only be a good fit for me.
