Illustration Project - Tarot Cards

I have been feeling in a bit of slump lately regarding to drawing and painting. Work and life in general haven't allowed me to work on the things I want to work, because I usually end up the day exhausted and without energy to do much.

So I was just craving something new to do. Designing a deck of tarot has been on my mind for a long time, the design has varied a lot in my head, but the idea of just creating one has never left me.

I decided then to combine this idea of designing a tarot cards deck with experimenting with collage - something I have also been curious about (there are actually some really cool looking decks created just using collage that you can see here, it looks "easy" but it's not).

Even if some (or even all!) of the cards look like crap at the end, at least I've tried at last to tackle this idea, that has been sleeping in my mind for such a long time. And it's a good illustration exercise, and just sheer practice.

From searching online and seeing other decks, I've gotten to the conclusion that the decks I liked the most were the most stylized/whimsical, so I tried to emulate that style.

I had some old origami paper, that I haven't really used for origami, and will probably will never use for that, so I decided to use it for the collage. The patterns are cool, and sometimes they really feet in with the card concept.

Below are the sketches for two of the cards in the process of being done, I also ended up going with portuguese names instead of English names. I might change the names and even the calligraphy if I treat these digitally at the end, but there still a long way to go until then.

So far I've done 8 cards, and decided on the layout for other 2, so a total of 10 are in the process of being done. There's still 12 more cards to go.

If I ever get around to finish this deck, I would like to try making the minor arcana decks using different techniques, I think that would be fun and just in general a good exercise in illustration, to impose myself certain restrains.

Thanks for stopping by!