The Queen’s Log

Making  a deck at home on your computer and designing a tarot deck  are two different subjects which I will address briefly in this article.  To make one, you need the designs.  Once you have the designs you will have to print them out and cut them and coat or laminate them to protect them.Although this sounds simple, it is a lot of work.  There are a number questions that need to be answered and problems that need to be worked out.What is the best paper to use?  Is it strong enough?  Will the ink smear? Will the color be brilliant enough? Can you print on both sides of the paper?  How will you cut them?  How will your round the corners? How large will they be? How many per sheet of paper can you print?do you line them up with the back design?  All of these problems must be worked out. This is just to print the deck at home on your computer.

If you want to design your own deck you should realize that it will involve 78 different designs.  This is not something that you will do in just a few months, it could take years.  Therefore, if you decide to take this project on realize that it will, for a while, become a way of life or an on-going hobby.  You must be passionate about it or you will probably design a few good cards and get bored and quit or just throw together a bunch of bad designs.

Rather than talk about the esoteric nature of divining with the tarot,  this article is a practical guide to creating your own personal tarot deck.  If you are considering this undertaking I am going to assume that you already have a keen interest in the tarot and its meaning to you.you must decide if you just want to print a deck for your own use or if you want to design your own personal deck.  If you just want to print a deck then you need to find some designs to print.  Perhaps you can find some free tarot card designs on the Internet.If you want to design your own cards then you have to buckle down and decide what your medium will be.  Pencil? Watercolor? Oil? Crayon? Ink?  Computer graphics? How many decks do you want to create? Do you plan on scanning them into the computer and saving them so you can print more decks or are you only going to create a single deck with original art in the original size of the card?These are all decisions you have to make.  All I can do is tell you how I did it.

I created the designs on the computer using photos and images of old master’s art in a paint shop program,  then I arranged them on a page in Printshop Pro and printed them,  laminated them, and cut them. I used a photo corner rounder on each corner.  The result was an almost indestructible deck of tarot cards.    It sounds simple doesn’t it?   I have been working on the designs for over three years, and it took me about a day to print cut and laminate a deck and a lot of experience and practice to cut them accurately with a small paper cutter.

I will be doing more articles about making and designing your own Tarot deck soon and I will be re-designing this Queen of Coins web site to be more about Tarot Cards and Tarot Card readings.