Greater Secrets Tarot
Early in the pandemic, I was stuck at home like everyone else, and found myself itching to illustrate. I bought a new iPad Pro and Apple Pencil and downloaded the Procreate app, and I was immediately smitten! While amassing a sizable collection of ‘practice’ drawings and doodles to develop my digital illustration skills, I decided to undertake a pretty huge project that has been on my bucket list since middle school… I was going to make my own tarot deck.
*cue thunder in the distance*
And WOW what an undertaking it was. I can’t understate how much I learned following this project from beginning to end…
As of today, I’ve shipped dozens of my tarot decks and countless art prints to tarot readers and fans in at least 9 countries across the world, since first printing in 2021, and used to sell decks for years in a couple local shops in the Tampa Bay area.
You can get your very own original illustrated Greater Secrets Tarot Deck, and the 22 Major Arcana cards are also available in two styles of print in my shop.
If you or someone you know may be interested in carrying the Greater Secrets Tarot Deck or art prints in your store, please email me to explore our options.
A little background on tarot, according to tarot.com:
Tarot is a divination system that uses a specific set of 78 illustrated cards. Some people see Tarot as a way to peer into the future or examine hidden aspects of a situation, while others use it as a therapeutic resource or simply a support for thinking outside the box and creating a sacred moment for themselves.
Tarot cards are small, paper cards that come in a deck, similar to playing cards, and are used for divinatory purposes. Each card represents a different archetypal energy or fundamental life lesson.
There are many ways to use Tarot cards. Most commonly, Tarot cards are used for personal readings, allowing people to ask their most pressing life questions and find answers in the symbols and imagery of the Tarot. Beyond readings, though, you can use Tarot cards as prompts for meditation, as beautiful reminders of personal goals, or as inspiration points for journaling or artistic expression.
In its simplest form, a Tarot card reading involves simply focusing on something you want to know, shuffling a deck of Tarot cards, and then pulling one or more cards from the deck at random. The most important part of a Tarot reading comes in the interpretation. As you examine and reflect on the cards that appear in your reading, new perspectives come to light, allowing you to access deeper understanding and empowerment.
I actually started doing manual tarot sketches on paper before I bought the iPad. I like to start with pencil and paper to flesh out a few basic ideas before starting into a digital illustration. (For these first several of the 78 cards, I even lined them with micron pens, to get a sense of the linework in a somewhat more finished style.) Then I take a picture of the sketch and import it into Procreate to do the linework digitally and refine the sketch into a drawing.
After drawing quite a first first drafts of different cards, I began to develop a style for the characters and backgrounds of the cards. Long, narrow fingers and limbs, small waists and feet, large heads with empty, melancholy eyes and thin stretched lips twisted in subtle emotion… fluffy clouds and tall wheat and drooping tulips dotting the landscapes… skulls and figures with horns and hoods and gallant knights and mermaids and more, all shared characteristics of the illustration style I’d developed for this project.
To ensure continued consistency across all 78 cards of the tarot deck, I put together a super basic style guide for my reference. This helped me make sure things like the characters’ feet and eyes and other features all ‘matched’ across cards, in the same style and brushes.
I also knew I’d need to pick a font for the card names under the illustrations. I combed through Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts, free font sites, and so on… for seemingly forever! Nothing looked right, and nothing quite matched the fuzzy edges of the lining brush/style I’d chosen.
I tossed around the idea of creating my own handwritten/drawn font, and thought, “why not?” So, again on the iPad, I painstakingly created an original font:
I decided on a somewhat dark and muted color palette. I wanted a little bit of a ‘creepy’ vibe to my deck, but still mystical and fun, as well as being ‘accessible’ and appealing to a wide audience. I developed a color palette in Procreate:
Once I had sketches of most of the 22 Major Arcana done, I pulled them into Procreate on my iPad. I edited the color settings to render the sketch in reverse, so that I could draw over it digitally. I even played with color early on in the project.
Totally in love with working on the iPad, I just put my head down and powered through the exciting process of illustrating 78 cards from scratch. I spent a lot of time researching the traditional Rider Waite and other historical decks’ imagery and meanings, so that my deck would truly speak to its practicians when doing readings. I kept extensive notes during that research, because I knew I’d be creating a readers’ guide to accompany my deck and help my Tarot readers decipher their cosmic messages.
A few of the cards in the initial line drawing process:
After deciding on my palette, I began the long process of coloring the line drawings in Procreate. Here are a few of the first round of colored illustrations:
I was working in CMYK color mode, because my intended final product was to be professionally printed, and that presented a problem: illustrating on a backlit screen, colors appeared to be much brighter when working on the iPad than when I rendered them as CMYK files and test-printed a few.
Unfortunately, I didn’t realize this until I had colored every. single. card.
I went back in and lightened all of the offending too-dark cards. So here are those three again, after lightening some of the darker colors:
For the backs of the cards, I wanted to use some kind of element(s) that were already woven throughout the deck’s imagery, so I took some of the recurring drawing pieces and tried out quite a large number of card back designs. Here are just a few of the choices I considered.
Of course, to eventually sell the tarot deck, I was going to need some kind of packaging. I explored my options of cool methods vs. cost per deck, and despite some incredibly nice lidded and hinged structured/hard-side boxes, I reluctantly decided I’d have to go with a simple tuck box. I also decided early on that I would not have the decks individually wrapped in plastic for environmental reasons.
I went through quite a few iterations of the box design, and laid it out on a printing template to account for printing bleeds and trim lines. Here is the final:
Every tarot deck comes with a small instructional guide booklet, which aids the practitioner in their readings. This booklet usually contains meanings for some or all of the cards, and may include tips for applying these meanings to your cards and your life.
During my deck research, I came to have a pretty good understanding of and familiarity with the meanings and feelings of the cards, and I read quite a few guide booklets to be able to paraphrase and use what I’d learned to create my own.
After taking several to write my own tarot guide, I then laid out the booklet in spreads totaling 32 pages, keeping in mind it would be same dimensions as the deck–read: pretty tiny–and I’d have to be careful to keep the text legible, even though there was a lot of information to fit in a small package.
Once I did test prints of some of the cards and assembled a home proof of the tuck box on my home Epson printer, I went back and color corrected in Procreate and Photoshop.
Then I uploaded my files to the printing press and got professional proofs in the mail, printed on the playing card paper I was going to use, so I could review everything before printing… Somehow, everything was still too dark when printed!
I color corrected everything digitally again, and got more proofs in the mail. This time they were good. Here is a photo of the approved printed proof of the tuck box.
And here is the first photo of the first printed deck!
