One of the hosts for Artist Trading Cards at ATCs for All regularly organizes swaps built around the major Celtic festivals and I have now participated in four of these: Lammas, Mabon, Samhain, Ostara, and Beltane. It has been a lot of fun to use the goal of finishing cards for these swaps to learn about some of my ancestral traditions, and I'm well aware of how primal these festivals are. The imagery is very earth-rooted: fire, flame, animals, plants. Each set of cards has been the result of very different inspirations and I am not sure I am seeing a pattern in them yet. I did not set out to copy a style from one batch to the next, although if I go through the year again doing these swaps, I may choose to do just that. Lammas is a Summer Holiday, arriving at August 1st; Mabon is an Autumn Equinox festival, and acorns are sometimes associated with it; Samhain is a harvest festival celebrated at the end of October: sacrificial animals are depicted; Ostara is celebrated at the Spring equinox and a lot of the imagery we get around Easter has deeper roots in this Northern European celebration of new life and regeneration; and, Beltane is associated with May Day and is celebrated with bonfires.
Cards created for the Lammas Swap
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