So, my friend Cari discussed with me once upon a time the idea of her studying tarot and painting me a custom tarot deck, which I thought was just the most amazing idea. I would absolutely love to have a tarot deck painted by my friend. But she needs to understand the tarot in order to paint it, so I gave her some of my books and loaned her a deck or two and I've been teaching her to read. Of course I showed off my tarot collection and talked about how designing the custom decks I had was an exercise in learning the tarot better. Rachel talked about how my Fullmetal Alchemist deck helped her learn the card meanings because she was able to relate the meaning to the artwork since she knows the series so well. And Cari expressed a wish for a Harry Potter deck. At that moment Rachel and I shared a glance and we knew exactly what we were doing for Cari for her birthday in February.
After some searching I only found one fan made deck that was based on Thoth tarot rather than Rider-Waite, and I've only read Rider-Waite and didn't want to confuse Cari as a new reader. So, turns out if I want a Harry Potter deck for Cari I was gonna have to do it myself.
Ohhhhhh, noooooes, whatever shall I do? If only I knew how to make custom decks.......
Aaaaaaaanyways.
Sarah and Amanda wanted in as well, basically I'd be doing the designing with input and opinions and financial support from them. So I started. And here is the Major arcana!
First of all, I originally created the card on the right just because I was looking for artwork I liked. My friends, quite accurately, pointed out that he was very pretty. I wanted to use the art on the left, but I just couldn't find a bigger size, the one I had was much too small. So I went with it, for a while, but it bothered me. So later, I went back and dug further and managed to find a bigger version, which was really exciting, because it's just so much better.
However, after more time passed, I realized I wanted to use that artwork for Neville's royalty card, and what I really wanted for the Fool was a picture of him looking young and awkward. So it got swapped again.
And isn't Neville just the perfect character for this card? Talk about a Journey. Neville is a whole different person by the end.
Molly Weasley art is surprisingly hard to find, so I had to include Arthur in my original idea. But I realized later Molly and Arthur were both going to get individual royalty cards, and several other characters were not getting enough attention, so I changed it. Tonks also makes an excellent option for the Empress and I love the artwork.
For the life of me I could not choose between these two pictures. I love the romance of the Christmas picture, but I love the sweet fun energy of the snuggly one. And in the end, I didn't go with either, I found a lovely picture of Ron and Hermione that fit the meaning so much better, but I don't currently have access to it to post it here, I'll add it later.
I found a nice picture of the flying car for the Chariot, but once I got to the end I realized we didn't have an individual card for Ron. So I found this rather triumphant picture of Ron on a broom that seemed really good for the card. But I ended up using that for his Royalty card, and went with the car.
Could not find an image of Sirius's death. Anything that wasn't a screenshot from the movie anyways. But his mugshot seems pretty disastrous to me.
I managed to ignore my prejudice against Snape for this card because I looooooove this art.
I had trouble finding good art of Lupin, people just want to draw young Lupin making out with young Sirius. I'm not sure how recognizable this image is, but it's well done? It's by a favorite artist of mine, but it just doesn't look like him. Rachel actually found a better image later that I used, which I will also have to add in later.
I was nervous about the double image, afraid it seemed crowded, so I made one with just Harry and Ginny just to see. But we ended up going with the double image one.
This was an interesting deck to put together. Getting the design right took some time, originally I wanted the card art to be framed by the Mirror of Erised, but I simply couldn't find artwork that didn't look cheesy or out of place or just bad. So I switched to a Marauder's Map theme. And I love the results. Making the edges fade out onto the parchment was a new skill for me, that I loved getting the hang of. And the faded edges made it so that I could completely bullshit any photo editing to make the images fit properly because I was just gonna fade it anyways. It was amazing.
Weirdly enough by this point I didn't even have a card back, which is usually the first thing I do, but the right image just wasn't coming to me. Slightly before we started, I reread all seven books so I'd have a good knowledge base to draw from, and Rachel, Sarah and I met up and went through each card and discussed what we thought would make a good image for them. It made the whole deck go faster, since I didn't have to come up with ideas, although I did have to change things in places where I couldn't find good art, or big enough images. All in all I'm pretty pleased with it. The only problem is I do not have a complete list of artwork sources. Due to the time crunch, I didn't spend a lot of time digging up and recording sources, if I could find a big enough image on Google Image Search I just went with it. I will have to complete the list and add it in later.
No comments:
Post a Comment