Creating your own deck, the process?

[duhhhhhderek]

Basically, I just started doing tarot readings and becoming educated on the subject. My friend is an artist and mentioned that he wanted to make his own deck. I spoke with him and we are going to work together designing our own deck. What kind of process have those of you used to get started on making your decks? Where do you start?

 

[Alta]

Hi Derek,

Others will probably reply, but check back through this forum. There have been several threads on this topic and they would get you started anyway.

Alta

 

[EthanJamesPetty]

I haven't made a deck that has been published yet, but I think maybe my experience with the first run can help. When starting over, my first step was to create a template for the deck to make sure I have a consistent card size and print-quality resolution (300dpi is a good standard).

Making some decisions about the overall gameplan might help as well - do you plan a full deck with majors and minors? How detailed will the minors be? If they're full color, full quality, it's going to take much more time to get through them all, but it will likely impact the amount of people interested in your deck.

I think another important decision is whether you are going for a collectible art deck or a more traditional deck for people to use in readings. If you go too crazy with the interpretations, it may look gorgeous, but people may have a hard time recognizing the cards in the reading.

I've read a few stories about people having a hard time getting their decks published because their theme was one that somebody else had done. I'm not suggesting you limit yourself creatively, but if you go with "Grimm Fairy Tale Tarot" as your theme and there's already a Grimm deck out, it's going to potentially hurt your chances to see it published.

I by no means an expert, so people may contradict me here, but I did make a complete deck about 10 years ago so I do know how tough they are to finishe and to publish

 

[gregory]

Just start creating a card.

It happens. The size, form, shape, will come to you as you work.

Now publication - that's something else again.

 

[Gloria Jean]

I started my deck by using paint shop pro and just playing around with ideas for fun using that program and any pictures I could find.

Then I experimented with printing them, laminating them etc. I have saved some of the very first designs I did in a box and when I look back on them I have to laugh. (I can't tell you how many Kings of cups I tried to get one I liked. I over-thought them, and over-worked them until I had to take a break. I worked on this first deck with a good friend who was a tarot deck collector.

That first deck was for our own use but it could not be shared because of copyright violations involved. We used it for doing readings for a few years, and then started designing another deck. Together we created another deck. When it was finally finished, she decided the copyright should be in her name and did not want to share it, even though it was a collaboration. So we parted ways and I started working on my third deck. This time I did not overwork it. I pulled it together in about three months.

So I have been tinkering with designing tarot cards for about three years.
I had collected a lot of pictures of the old masters from the Internet and started using them to make my latest deck.

I found a print shop to print them for me on quality 100 pound cover and I designed a box and wrote a little white book for the deck. I have to cut them and round the corners, and make the boxes. I also built a website to show my cards. They have come a long way and I sell them from my website.

For me, it is more about the art than the reading of the cards now. I love the art. My current deck is comprised of old masters work. Some of the cards are completely designed using parts of old masters painting so much so that you can't recognize what paintings they are from, others are only altered a little.

I just wanted to put together the deck as fast a I could. In doing so, I think it holds together as a single work of art instead of looking like a bunch of disconnected paintings. This is the Infinite visions tarot. You can see the cards at my website.

Gloria

 

[Egypt Urnash]

So one day I was hanging out with my boyfriends late at night drawing. One of them reminded me of the idea that'd been kicking around of using Tarot as an excuse to draw a lot of kinky rubber porn, and I started drawing Majors.

About three cards in it turned more Serious than pornographic; I quickly had roughs for about half the Majors. A few days later I roughed out the rest of the Majors. Then I asked myself a question: Was I willing to see this all the way through? Because I knew that if I took one of these drawings through to a finished piece I'd have to finish them all. Not just the Majors; I'd have to do the research and do thoughtful images for the whole deck.

I answered "yes".

About a year later, I'd finished it. About half the deck was cranked out at a rate of one card every three or four days, as I had the deadline of a gallery exhibition of the whole thing.

Choose your primary sources: whose thoughts on what each card should be do you want to be inspired by?

Choose your medium: What's comfortable? What can you work with most fluidly? You'll be doing close to a hundred pieces in it; this is probably not the time for something you're gonna be groping around and experimenting with. I did my usual process of starting with a pencil sketch and then working over that in Illustrator, because I've been doing that for most of a decade.

Choose your themes: Tarot is a tool for telling stories about the world; what sort of stories do you want to encourage people to tell with your deck?

I started with the Majors. Most of my sketches made it into the final pack but about a fourth of them were worked further. I also didn't do all the Majors first; I couldn't decide how to handle the High Priestess and the High Priest, so I ended up leaving them until the very end. Once I'd done about ⅔ of the Majors, I started working on the number cards as well; I ended up leaving the Courts for the endgame as well.

Most people seem to start with the Majors. Some people end with them; it's not uncommon to see Major-only decks. It's easy to imagine doing just the Majors and then deciding that's enough; I think I deliberately made myself start doing some of the number cards so I couldn't sit back and say "okay this is finished" when I did all the Majors.