The Tarot Experiment
My journey with the Tarot began with an experiment. I started learning to do readings using the mythic deck. I was amazed at the results and became a fan of tarot cards.
Eventually I decided to design my own deck just for fun. I began by using paint shop pro and pictures of celebrities. As I became more comfortable with paint shop, I became more serious about creating an entire deck and started using pictures of paintings to construct the designs. The the result of the final project is : Infinite Visions Tarot
Designing and producing your own tarot deck involves many steps and often takes years to complete. Only the most dedicated tarot enthusiasts will attempt such an undertaking.
Both a knowledge and interest in art and in the tarot are needed to be able to complete the project.
Infinite Visions Tarot is the perfect deck for use by both professional readers and beginners. If you are familiar with the Rider Waite structure of tarot, there will be very little learning curve using this deck. If you are a beginner, the realistic and artistic images will be a pleasure to study and they will be easy to get a feeling for.
It took me long enough to learn the traditional meanings of the cards myself, and I did not want create a deck that would cause tarot readers to have to go through a long learning process for reading the cards.
I ordered enough canvases from China to paint all the cards and the order included extra canvases because there was a minimum amount I had to order. Hence I now have a garage full of canvases.
As an artist I had planned to simply lay out the designs on the computer and then paint them. The resulting painting would then be used for the card design. When faced with this monumental task I realized that I may never get the job finished and I would have become a slave to painting only tarot cards and my other art would suffer.
The China order was a whole different story which involved almost not being able to retrieve the canvases from the port authority without paying an obscene amount of money which I did not have. Luckily, I did get them to release the canvases after I convinced them I had not purchase them for resale.
When I printed the deck designs from the computer, they looked very good. It was then that I decided to abandon the idea of painting each design on canvas, I did not want to spend the rest of my life painting tarot cards, and I wanted a working deck now, not ten years down the road.
The deck went through quite a few changes in a few short months, even in how I created it by hand. At first it had to be laminated. The designs had a boarder around them and the cards had a different design on the back. All of these things presented different challenges and problems but that did not prevent me from offering it for sale anyway.
I started selling the deck in December of 2009 over the Internet to collectors and tarot card readers.
Eventually I found a way to produce the cards without having to laminate them and improved on the quality of printing. Currently I am still producing them by hand, cutting them, rounding the corners and making the boxes,
I wrote a little white book to go with the deck after someone on a tarot forum asked me if it came with a LWB. I did not know what LWB meant. I asked them what an LWB was. They said it stood for "Little White Book."
You can purchase one of these decks at www.infinitevisionstarot.com.