Tarot Deck Redesign: The Forest of Life
Tarot decks have been related to occultism and esoteric practices for a long time, but it wasn’t always that way. For centuries, tarot was nothing more than a playing deck. And much like “lotería”, tarot symbolism held no deeper meaning other than to represent folk icons from the region, many times involving religious imagery. So more than the esoteric meaning of the deck that is, as I see it, deceptive and shallow, with this deck I decided to accentuate the richer historical, folkloric and religious meaning that has been mostly forgotten, and infuse it with a dose of freshness from modern illustration and the mystery of the forest in hopes it’ll prove to be much richer and authentic.
The Forest of Life tarot deck is inspired in archetypes from Western Antiquity and all the illustrations are composed in different forests. To introduce this deck redesign concept, I will go through the process of designing one of the cards. I hereby present to you: the process behind The Hanged Man.
I start with conceptual work to map out a proper modernization of Judas and his suicide. For that, I make a list of general descriptions and elements I want in the piece.
Pulling from the Christian background of 15th century Europe, the design for The Hanged Man is based on Judas Iscariot. Once I have an idea of the conceptual elements I need to make the piece work, I start off by studying some composition alternatives to figure out what elements convey the feeling I’m looking for. I add comments to fix mistakes and remember corrections, as well as to identify focal points, working my way to the final sketch.
With my thumbnails and references next to me, I start the digital illustration. Referring to my thumbnails, I try keeping shapes simple, interesting and readable. I pay more attention to proportion and composition now because these will be the lines that’ll show in the final illustration. Also, I chose an appropriate background color taking into account prior conceptual planning and lighting.
Once the basics are jotted down, I choose the colors focusing on the foreground since from it I will extract all the colors for the background. The light source is set at this stage.
I finish off the illustration by adding trees fading in the background for a more cohesive atmosphere and adding a blur filter to push the focus to the front. TRACK is used for the name of the card.
A very similar approach was used for the back of the card, thumnailing on paper, then creating the digital version from scratch and basing the colors on the general feel I want the cards to have; a little whimsical, but somewhat mysterious. I am using TRACK and The Breakdown for the title; all the illustrations are done in Krita.
Final touches and minor editing is done in Photoshop.
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FUN FACT: This was my original idea. Didn’t work out very well so I stopped and moved on.
