I started with Thoth took simple meanings from the titles but had trouble stringing them together in a reading.
The RW pics on the minors helped me get a wider association to apply a card meaning with an event in someone's reading and I found I could string each little 'stage scene' in the RW minors together into a little play.
There's so much good stuff going on here, it was hard to choose where to enter this thread. So I'll start with the illustrated pips, which seem to be the major draw for the RWS. While I find the drawings charmingly archaic (yes, even the blood-thirsty Swords; as a lover of swords-and-sorcery fantasy literature, I'm long over that one) and perfectly workmanlike for their purpose, I don't use them much as an inspiration for my reading with this deck. I've developed such an over-stuffed mental "filing cabinet" of correspondences (numbers, colors, symbols, etc.) over the decades that the illustrations seem incidental in most cases. But I
will fall back on them when I'm stuck, mainly as a tool to kind of "jog" things along. I like to have the querent in front of me when I read (which is a whole 'nuther debate I won't reopen here), so I can immediately try out different avenues of inquiry along the lines suggested by the images. I should point out, though, that the Thoth was my first (and probably at this point my "forever") deck, at least until I bestir my lazy metaphysical butt and get on with the Marseille. So I came late to the RWS party, although I did read (well, "wade through" is probably more accurate) the PKT early on.