[Art] Art Magic and Spells

[milkyway]

Does anyone else do spells through art and if yes can you share?

I've been getting into it recently and what I do is, being a digital artist, I draw on the computer. I like to start with a layer where i just write some text with my intention and then i make another layer and paint over it. Then i erase the whole thing. I see this as burning a sigil.

I like to use heavypaint for this. It's just personal preference because of all the trippy effects.

I've done art magic before with traditional means like acrylics and held up those paintings on my wall or specific places to charge them but I like to be more subtle these days with my craft. So digital works for me. Though I've only gotten into digital recently and never did a lot art magic in general.

Another thing I could do is draw a sigil and then paint over it, or include it somewhere in the drawing and post it publicly and have it be charged that way, but I haven't tried that yet.

I'd like to know if others also practice this type of magic, if yes how, results you've had, and advice?
Does doing it digitally as opposed to traditionally affect the outcome? Let me know your thoughts

 

[albie]

>Another thing I could do is draw a sigil and then paint over it, or include it somewhere in the drawing and post it publicly and have it be charged that way, but I haven't tried that yet.

The old collective subconscious routine, eh? It works. Personally I prefer art to magic. I'm too angry. "It hurts the spell."

 

[harokatz]

Everything I do creatively is magical to an extent, thinking in terms of hypersigils etc., I make primarily cartoons and comics and its a mutual thing of producing work which "wants to be heard" and also wanting people to tap into kind of the unconscious elements thru the work...got into such a logic through researching the history of counter culture and pop occulture...Psychic TV, Tape Delay: Confessions of the 80s Underground, the works of Jeffrey Kripal, Clive Barker. A book that rlly changed the way I engage with audience and art is "Secret Don't Tell: An Encyclopedia of Hypnosis" in terms of thinking of any successful artwork as entering one into a perceptive, "lowered", altered state

 

[Zelator2148]

I'm not sure it's exactly "magic" but I created what I call Hermetic (more properly Qabalistic) heraldry using gematria to transliterate my given name into Hebrew letters, and then creating works of art related to those letters with public-domain clip-art, colored pencils and chalk pastels that I turned into collage. I can't link my blog posts here but if you google "What's In a Name?" you might find it.

 

[milkyway]

The old collective subconscious routine, eh? It works. Personally I prefer art to magic. I'm too angry. "It hurts the spell."

Same. I have no patience for herbs and sewing and things.

 

[Nembra]

I usually avoid casting spells stricte, but I do improvise melodies to psalms when reciting the Breviary. Not much in terms of effects, but it does clear the mind quite nicely.

 

[Aldebaran]

I think digital works just fine for this. Honestly, it might even give you some options that are harder to do with physical media — hidden layers, merging things together, distortion, painting something completely out, deleting the finished file, etc.

The bit about painting over the intention caught my attention. I don't know that I'd personally see that as exactly the same thing as burning a sigil. Painting over it feels more like obscuring, burying, or concealing it. Erasing or deleting the whole thing feels closer to destruction or release.

Not saying one is better than the other. I just think the difference is interesting.

I really like the idea of putting the intention or sigil on a layer underneath the finished artwork. Nobody else ever has to see it, but it's still literally built into the piece. You could probably get pretty creative with that too — parts of the image covering it, pieces of the sigil worked into the composition, certain shapes or marks repeating without being obvious, that kind of thing.

As far as digital versus traditional, I don't see why one would automatically be weaker. They're just different mediums. With physical work you can burn something, bury it, cut it, hang it somewhere, let it weather, etc. Digitally you can hide it, overwrite it, transform it, duplicate it, transmit it, or wipe it out completely.

I'm a little less certain about the idea of strangers "charging" an image just by seeing it. Maybe. But I can definitely see posting it publicly as part of the act itself — more like sending it out, releasing it, or putting it into circulation. I dont like the idea of others charging it for you because they dont have consent. It makes it predatory and vampiric to me.

There's actually a lot you could experiment with here. Digital art has its own little magical vocabulary once you start looking at what the medium actually lets you do.

I’ve actually written quite a bit about this kind of thing in my personal system — digital magic, art magic, embedded sigils, using destruction/concealment/release differently, etc. If you’re curious, it’s linked in my bio.