I have wanted to make a tarot deck for years… a lot of years… but I had always been stumped about what style and theme I wanted to focus on.  There are so many choices!  Way back on January 1, 2018, when I couldn’t sleep, I finally had a focused inspiration for what style and theme I would use for a tarot deck.  I wanted to make it in chiaroscuro (high contrast, with lots of black), and focus on each suit as a different family of animals.  It seemed like dogs would make an excellent choice for pentacles (earth, reliability, foundation), aquatic animals for cups (obviously), cats for wands (fire, active), and birds for swords (smart, air).

A couple months ago I drew up concept sheets for the aces, including descriptive information since I’m using this project partially as a study in what each card means to me, to get more familiar with the tarot overall.

Then I attempted to figure out the Two cards, and immediately ran into a stumbling block.  One family of animals per suit was clearly going to be too forced, and I needed to just use the animal that I felt could best symbolize the meaning of each card.  Fine.  I would use animals for the minor arcana, and mythological creatures for the major arcana.

Now I’m completely stumped.  I’m honestly not sure if the problem is that I am in a creative rut (probably mostly from lack of doing anything creative), or if I need to reevaluate the idea of leaving humans completely out of the designs.  I have a couple concepts for both the two of wands and the two of swords, but I’m not in love with any of them, and I really want to have designs that sing to me.  If I do decide to bring humans into it, how do I do that without it seeming awkward to have some designs with humans, and some without, or do I need to include humans in all of them?

This might take a while…