Make Your Own Tarot Cards

One way to gain a more personal experience of Tarot is to make your own Tarot cards. This Tarot art project can be an insightful way to discover more about yourself and your own magical qualities. By creating cards that represent who you are at different phases of your life, you can gain a better understanding of your own unique gifts skills and attributes. Use the cards you make as meditation tools or as a way to remind yourself of what is really important to you during those times of challenge or confusion in life.

Read on and discover how to make a “Tarot Deck of You.”

1. Decide which medium you want to use to create your cards, such as photography, collage, painting or drawing. For the artistically challenged, collage is probably one of the most accessible ways to create your cards. To make a collage Tarot card, you’ll need to gather magazines and pictures that you feel represent you in different areas in your life. For photography, or other mediums, you’ll want to gather, props and costumes that express who you are. 

2. Spend some time going through a traditional Tarot deck and decide what kind of energy or archetype you want to be in your first card. Do you want to showcase your feminine energy like the Empress and High Priestess cards? Or are you more interested in expressing your warrior, active, out-in-the-world energy, like the Chariot or the Magician? Once you’ve decided the general theme of your card, pick from the images, props and costumes that most express your own personal connection to the theme. For example, if you want to emphasize making big change in your life, like the Wheel of Fortune, Death or Fool card, gather images that reflect the big changes you’ve already made in your life. You can choose pictures of yourself after a big move, or magazine images of someone in an academic setting, reflective of a time in your life when you went to school. Use your imagination and creativity to come up with examples of pictures, props and costumes that most show your own unique way of expressing the energies of change, love, work and so on.

3. Once you’ve gathered the appropriate materials for your cards, decide how you want to display these. Assign a number to your first card. This number can correspond with the card that you’re modeling your own card after, or you can assign a number that is special to you for some reason. For a collage, you’ll want to glue your images on cardboard or other hard backing. For a photograph, picture or painting, set up the props and other images so that they have the general look and feel of a traditional card, only using your own personal images arranged in a way that is pleasing to you. The size of the card is up to you. If you plan on making a complete deck of cards, you may want to keep them around the general size of a traditional deck.