One thing I found interesting during my preliminary research on the texts we'll be reading this semester is that Pamela Colman Smith, the author/illustrator of Annancy Stories, illustrated the Rider-Waite tarot cards, of which I had a deck when I was a kid. It made me think about how I never really think of iconic imagery like that as being the product of an individual artist, though I guess obviously it'd necessarily have to be. I'm excited by the possibility of discovering throughout this course the stories behind more familiar artworks the origins of which I've never considered before.

Similarly, as someone with only a cursory exposure to Aubrey Beardsley's work, it was interesting to discover that some of his pieces I'm familiar with were produced for the Oscar Wilde play Salome. It caused me to consider how many other artworks I enjoy -- in the Victorain period or otherwise -- were unbeknown to me produced to be paired with other media, and furthermore how my ignorance of this limits the meaning I ascribe to these works. Looking forward to learning more about how multimodality informs both artists' approaches to their work and the audience's reception to it.