Tarot Decks: Complete Collection & Story

In 2014, I survived a major health crisis when a handful of chronic illnesses I hadn't known about all mega-flared at once. I found myself suddenly unable to pursue any of the passions or work I'd trained for, with far too much time on my hands. I'd been casually reading tarot for myself and seriously studying art for fourteen years prior, so I set out to design a tarot deck as a portfolio building challenge and a recovery hobby. I began blogging my process here to share the art, along with grounded and ethical divination approaches for a year or two. To my surprise, Interrobang Tarot took on a life and mind of its own.
The Spirit Vertigo Deck was the only deck I'd originally intended to design. This began as a stream of consciousness series of maximalist marker drawings. I was dead broke at the time, so I worked in Sharpie pens on card stock and "scanned" my art on my phone.

My illustration skills were rusty at first, as I'd spent most of my free time in my twenties on music. By the time I got to The World, my earlier and later designs looked like they'd been drawn by completely different artists.... But joint pain and strain injuries had crept into my hands, and I was unable to continue working on the deck as planned.

I'd already begun seeing and sketching a second deck with ornamental symbols and alternative minors. Its minimalist style was more physically forgiving, so I tabled the Spirit Vertigo designs and went all in on The Black Ink Tarot.
Meanwhile, a couple spreads I'd designed here had taken off overnight, and my process art had attracted enough interest that I didn't want to fold when I ran into roadblocks. As the artwork for the Black Ink deck progressed, I sat down to format its little white booklet. I was shocked when chapter-length essays started spilling out instead of one-liner card blurbs. I'm a reluctant writer, and had zero intention of making books happen, so I tabled that mess. I figured I'd knock out an even simpler deck based off the journaling glyphs I'd designed for the blog, while I figured out what to do with the verbal part of this picture, and how to reign it in or make it stop. (Adorable/doomed.) By the time the artwork for both the minimalist decks were done, I realized their multi-layered symbolism wouldn't translate to others *without* the guidance of a 300+ page tome.

That's how I wound up designing three interconnected decks, a blog, a couple hundred tarot spreads, and a book all at once.

the Interrobang Tarot

Each deck in this collection explores the same symbolic system through a slightly role.

The Interrobang Tarot was inspired by the aesthetics of Zener cards used for psi testing in the 1930s to 1960s, but works off the tarot's structure and symbolic building blocks.

This is as close to a sensory deprivation chamber as you can get in a deck. The cards point to the tarot's elements, suits, geometric numerology, astrological correspondences, and major archetypes, then get out of the way for the reader's own psi, imagery, and text to come through. 

Decorative borders separate the majors, minors, and courts at a glance so you can work with each arcana set independently.

The Black Ink tarot Deck

The Black Ink Tarot Deck is a modern-traditional folkloric oracle grafted onto the tarot's structure and stock characters.

This deck was visually inspired by yankee folk art, antique printers' ornaments, and 1960s and 70s psychedelic poster art. Symbolically, it melds historic European folklore and fairy tales with North American flora and fauna. The suits are matchsticks drops, arrows, and gems. 

Aw lookout! This one has a fun & friendly trickster spirit, and a track record of requesting folkloric etiquette from its readers.... It wants to be your friend and tell you death jokes! Black Ink loves to dig into shadow work, creative and poetic development, and rebellion, with a spicy, saucy sense of humor. Hauntedness levels not guaranteed. Sold as a curio. 

The Spirit Vertigo Tarot

I had to give up maximalist marker drawing completely to heal and preserve my abilities in visual art. As I chipped away at other projects, I developed my hand in ergonomic brushed ink painting techniques, in the hopes of circling back and completing the Spirit Vertigo deck someday. 

By the time I published my first two decks, the social media landscape and deck printing markets had changed so drastically that I was no longer able or willing to produce a third deck in deck form.

I had, however, generated enough art from the blog and brushed ink experiments to patch the gaps and complete a majors-only series of maximalist tarot artworks in the Spirit Vertigo collection. These designs are available now as prints, posters, and tees. This collection explores the Major Arcana through a faintly heretical, animist mystic lens. Doubt replaced The Chariot and Reflection replaced Judgement. All the other titles are traditional.

Spirit Vertigo is a yummy sort of disorientation, characterized by awe, sometimes fear, and instinctive grounding in reaction to one's partial dissolution before something incredibly beautiful or palpably ineffable.

Fortune's Inkwell

Fortune's Inkwell is the full length guidebook accompanying the entire collection. This is a stand-alone esoteric tarot text that can pair with any other deck or school. You don't need my decks to work with the book, but I highly recommend working with the book to get the most out of your experience with my decks. Available on ebook or paperback.

Fortune's Inkwell takes a one-room schoolhouse approach, braiding foundational, symbolic building blocks together with intermediate, advanced, and non-standard tarot techniques to deepen your practice at any level.

Much of the subtext here draws inspiration from historic folklore and bioregional animism, but the tone and problem-solving approach is playful, warm, contemporary, and deeply human. This system is heavy on lyrical reinterpretations, queering hierarchies, and Underground reversal theory.
The Black Ink and Interrobang Tarot decks were a featured "project we love" campaign on Kickstarter, and won full funding in the first seven hours! Thanks to backer support, we were able to produce full, boutique quality print runs on luxury stock with foil edges and boxes for both decks. 

I'm so delighted by what we've created together here in ten years of tarot design with the help of this community. This is what happens when you give a mouse a pack of Sharpie pens, some card-stock, and a smartphone.

Interrobang Tarot was never a full-time career, but it did help me heal from illness and trauma while building a professional grade, independent multimedia studio from scraps and ashes. Now that my work in tarot is complete, we'll see what happens when you give a mouse a recording studio and a rogue-theatrical, dark comedic folklore school.... Come see!