Some advice on symbols

Hi
I'm looking at making some decks for personal use only but as I'm not a good artist I'm using photos and pictures. But how important is the symbols that appear on many of the cards? For example the High Priestess between two colums. I'm not sure ho I'd be able to add symbols so does this matter if you know what the card represents?

Depends on whether it is strictly a personal deck or you want other people to be able to use it. Also I would say that you don't have to cram every symbol onto every card. There are a few decks like that and they are impossibly cluttered, see here.

Most artists will express what the, for example, High Priestess means to them and may or may not use specific symbols. But if it is too far 'out there', only the original artist and perhaps a few others will be able to relate to it.

There is a deck published by Adam McLean which is just flowing colours for each card, see here. Yes, you can get that far away from symbols, but only a small group of people will find it to be 'tarot' per se.

So, you can go from cramming every possible symbol on to only the artistic impression, and it will be 'tarot' and usable at least to you.

Alta

Hi
I'm looking at making some decks for personal use only but as I'm not a good artist I'm using photos and pictures. But how important is the symbols that appear on many of the cards? For example the High Priestess between two colums. I'm not sure ho I'd be able to add symbols so does this matter if you know what the card represents?

Hey Torchwood, how are you.
I made a deck in 2003 using an unfamiliar style - I wasn't particularly adept at drawing people but I was working to a concept. I completely abandoned the small numbers from 2-7 and designed by own symbols instead. My tarot is technically an Oracle, because it departs from the tarot guidelines. And instead of even using cards with symbols as per traditional tarot, I worked the design around a piece of music. The music was accompanied by dialogue that leads one through the planetary tarot spheres, and I simply broke the first 4 into sections and painted an image to suit each one. Also, I used paintshop to just draw the symbols and then shrunk them down and placed them on the bottom of the cards where I left a blank space.

I can tell you that its not overly important what the tarot looks like - I managed to sell my own for a very high price despite my awkward artwork - so you should take heart and just give it a go. I am also able to give strong readings because of my familiarity with my own tarot symbolism and archetypal connexions - so my advice would be to imbue the tarot with your own energies and skill level and worry less about following orthodox doctrine.

Cheers mate and good luck,
RA

symbols

there is an underlying structure to the tarot, follow that and let your muse do the rest. You can even use your own symbolism to illustrate the structure, as I did in the Pearls of Wisdom, using Runes and the language of flowers combined with some of the traditional symbolism. One thing you can do is understand what the traditional symbolism means, then create the same meanings in another way.

Pamela Steele, of Steele Wizard Tarot and I are developing a workshop on tarot deck creation I will post about it as we go, we want to be as helpful to everyone who wants to create a deck, as we have done.

Enjoy your journey through the Tarot
Cheers
Hexi

Thanks everyone. They are just for my own use and as my imaging programmes are rather limited I'm glad I won't have to try creating little bits and pieces.