Here are my notes from our Saturday afternoon session with Mary Greer. She taught us how to do three-card drawings. She wasn’t just talking about drawing three cards from the deck. She was talking about DRAWING our readings, on paper, with images from three separate cards.
In other words, she had us shuffle, pull three cards, and then combine the symbols and images of our choice from those cards into one whimsical drawing.
I’ll scan my drawing and post it in a few minutes.
Mary Greer
We’ve come here to do one of my favorite exercises, the three card drawing. All of you should have a sheet of paper. There’s also a container of about 25 crayons on your table. Those are for you to SHARE. This is a test. Can you share?
The three card drawing came about because of a workshop that I was in. Let me go back a little further. The second time I taught at Omega institute in the next cabin over was a man not taking my class but he was very much into tarot, but he wanted me to see his journal that he kept for his tarot work. He opened it up and showed me how he kept his spreads. Most amazing drawings, cards sketched into position in a Celtic Cross, but he took away the boundaries and had them interacting with each other so there was this interacting overlapping of scenes from one to the other. Just whatever spontaneously came to him. He had little notes here and there but primarily it was the drawings and you could see how they had stopped doing what they were doing in the cards and were just acting in a different way. I was so overwhelmed I said that’s really great but I could never do this. Through the years I learned to play pictionary. I taught my daughter who was only six. She could play pictionary. So I found out that anybody could play pictionary. So I started realizing that people could get information across. It’s not a matter of having artistic ability. I still hadn’t dared to do this. Several years later I was in a class and a woman in the class said, How do you integrate the meanings of the cards. I just don’t get it. It was one of those sudden moments in the class, I said, here’s what you do. Take three cards, here’s a paper, here’s some crayons, and do what we’re going to do in a few minutes. Loa nd behold in worked and it worked amazingly well. You’re going to be taking the borders off the cards and integrating the images in some kind of way. There’s no absolute right or wrongs. Suggestions, but you can do whatever you want with it. Just doing raw scribbles works. I don’t recommend it but it works. I’ve since used it lots at lots of different workshops. What I found so amazing is that not only does it show you a dift way of looking but it seems to change the wiring in your brain. Bypassing your usual way of looking at things.
We just work with the images themselves. You’r going to work very spontaneously with te images themselves. Capturing whatever grabs your attention first and letting it evolve. It’s a playful kind of way of approaching and putting the three cards into basically one scene. There are exceptions to that. Sometimes I see people doing a sequence, a road. Personally I consider that the least successful way of doing this exercise. Not wrong. Not bad. Occasionally very meaningful. But what seems to work a little better is when you take attributes from one card and put them in the hands of another. Put one figure in the background of another card. You might have the background of the moon and the other cards in the scene. They may be relating to each other. They may not. Dominant figure with attributes from the other card, but not the figures. Or you may have figures from each card interacting in some way. I requested an overhead projector, but unfortunately I’m going to have to show … Here’s the Five of Cups in the general background of the four of wands, and who else is there? The two of wands. So now we know that the little castle in the background and it’s interesting that there are a little couple here, but not too important. SO there’s some kind of story. We don’t see the whole thing.
Work with a different deck and your style will change.
You don’t have to become an artist to do this. That’s not the point.
You’re not to use pen or pencil on this to do the basic outline. No erasures allowed. If you make a mistake, integrate it. The mistakes are to be integrated in. One woman the central figure she started out with the clothing and the hands, but ran out of room for the face. It became one of the most important elements in the picture. You don’t have to tape on an extra piece o paper. You’re going to use only crayons. You’re going to not be analyzing in any way shape or form. You’re going to see what catches your eye first. You’re going to see that some of the figures, like the two of pentacles, you’ll find that the cups from the five of cups are what that juggler is juggling. Now we know how those cups got spilled. One of the pictures that had death, the two of pentacles and the six of swords in the boat, so they had to get along somewhow as they crossed the river. So you literally are going to be integrating the card meanings in some kind of way. When you get to the end of the process if you have any time left I really recommend that you take the edge of a crayon and shade in the background. That really integrates. The shading really brings things together in an important way.
Q: Are you going to be asking a specific question?
A: If you have a question, and you’ve been asking the question all along and realize you’ve been asking the wrong question … Or my all time favorite, what do I most need to know right now? Please don’t ask yes or no questions.
Q: Do we get to choose our own three cards?
A: You’re going to be shuffling and drawing three cards.
Q: Makes me think of Jung’s book where his patients drew pictures of their process.
A: One woman in particular, Christiana Morgan, she actually with her lover was the primary person in creating the thematic aperception test out of Princeton or Harvard, she was the mover and shaker who did the research.
Elenor: It’s pictures of archetypes that are ambiguous and you have your patients talk about them. We should make a tarot deck of her pictures.
M: If you do a series of pictures with this technique you will wind up with documentation of your growth.
Mkgreer @ pacbell .net if you want to send a picture or photocopy of your images.
Shuffle.
Draw three cards.
Move the cards around. Before you do anything, move the cards around. Overlap them a bit. Put them as many different ways as you can until something grabs you. When you notice something, put the wreath on the world somewhere on your page. Where you put it will determine where the other things will go. Go with some piece that jumps out at you first and put the rest in where it seems appropriate. If there’s no room, move it around or put part of the body elsewhere. There are no mistakes in this process.
20 minutes to draw, and then discuss.
