Catholicism meets witchcraft with this online tarot card reader with High Renaissance themes.
A long-cherished passion of mine has been exploring the art of the Italian Renaissance. The adoption of new artistic techniques and technological advancements was almost magical compared to the monotonous and dark works of the era before, yet it preserved the culture's preference for religious art. I designed this set of Major Arcana tarot cards to showcase the story-rich Southern Renaissance works. While some of the imagery on the cards ventures further North, or even into the Baroque, each piece was picked to match the meaning of the card.
I wanted to make an online diviner, so after creating the 23 Major Arcana in Adobe Illustrator, I had to code a website that would generate random cards in the spread. The site has two sections: one that gives a Celtic Cross spread reading, and one that tells more about each card. This includes information about both the meaning of the card, and why each Renaissance artwork was chosen to represent it. You can check it out here.
Check out the cards
The first webpage I ever created...
I knew that I wanted to make a deck of tarot cards, but I had a lot of ideas for the illustrations. At first I planned on creating the deck featuring the most flamboyant players of the National Hockey League, but I had a couple of other ideas as well.
Originally I illustrated the cards with the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator. I wanted to depict each player in the poses of the figures seen in the additional cards. Each one took me about three hours to draw, and after finishing a few, I realized it would take too long to complete all 23.
Once I had decided on my theme, I used a template that I had created to make identical artboards in Illustrator. I placed each corresponding artwork inside of the frame and then exported them to a project folder. My CSS and JS can be accessed from the site.