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Create Your Own Tarot Cards

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Learn about the art of reading tarot cards, and then paint your own colorful deck! This step-by-step guide includes card stock with 80 blank cards so you can practice right away. With painting lessons from Adrianne Hawthorne of Ponnopozz, an artist with a vibrant, contemporary style, Create Your Own Tarot Cards will inspire you to make your own beautifully expressive tarot cards in a variety of colors. In addition to learning how to create a personalized deck, Theresa Reed, The Tarot Lady, situates you in the world of tarot with a thorough introduction to this ancient art, as well as an overview of tarot reading. It's a perfect primer for beginners!

144 pages, Paperback

Published May 3, 2022

21 people want to read

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5 stars
4 (23%)
4 stars
2 (11%)
3 stars
8 (47%)
2 stars
1 (5%)
1 star
2 (11%)
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
Profile Image for Natalie  all_books_great_and_small .
3,097 reviews161 followers
May 21, 2022
I received an advance reader copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review via netgalley and the publishers.

Create your own Tarot Cards is a fun hobby and art book. The book is bright snd colourful and full of information and photographs. The book gives you information so you can understand each card so you can paint your own unique tarot cards. I liked the concept of this book but found it didn't give enough information for each card and further reading would need to be done to fully understand each card before painting your own.
This would be better broken down into a series of books or even a magazine series. The cards shown are beautifully illustrated and the artist gives you ideas and information on painting, illustrating, designing and colour schemes for each card.
Profile Image for Emma book blogger  Fitzgerald.
632 reviews22 followers
May 2, 2022
I love the front cover very colourful and bright draws you straight to the book. Create your own tarot cards is great for beginners. When you open the book it’s just as bright as the front cover with lots of pictures of the tarot cards and has information on all the tarot, brief history and than goes on to show you and inform you how to make and paint your own tarot cards. Which is really good and useful. Strongly recommend this book if you want to make your own tarot cards and to find out more about them.
Thank you NetGalley for letting me read this book.
72 reviews
April 28, 2022
This book is split into two halves: the first part is all about the tarot with a very brief overview of the cards and a slightly more in depth look at spreads. The second part is a walkthrough of painting a selection of the cards. It is a very quick read as there are a lot of photos along with the text.

This is a book about creating your own tarot cards and in order to do that, you need to have an understanding of what each card means so you can interpret the symbolism in your own way. This is where this book falls down. Visually, it is very appealing, with full pages of colour photographs. But there is no focus on card meanings and symbolism. Very briefly are we introduced to what the court cards mean, what each suit of the minor arcana means and that is it. Two half-pages of text covering the meanings of the cards in a book expecting you to be able to create your own deck! Admittedly, there is a little bit more information in the second part of the book when a selection of twenty tarot cards are illustrated for us, but that still leaves some readers in the dark regarding the other fifty eight cards. For this reason, this is not a book for beginners as knowledge of the cards is crucial and not provided here.

I’m not sure what I expected from the artistic part of the book when I began reading. On a personal level I did not like the artist’s style as it was too childlike and simple but this has not influenced my final star rating as it is subjective. However, instead of being shown on repeat how to paint basic plants on a card, I would have preferred a discussion on the symbolism of each card with advice on how to best interpret them artistically, perhaps with a look at brainstorming and researching and discovering possible personal interpretations. This book just did not inspire me to want to create my own cards, not did it give me the information and direction that I wanted.

With thanks to Netgalley and Walter Foster Publishing for providing an advance review copy. All opinions in this review are my own.
Profile Image for Su.
19 reviews4 followers
August 16, 2022
From the graphics to the fonts, the book is very aesthetically pleasing, but that’s pretty much all that it is.

The information provided about Tarot is incredibly elementary. A quick internet search will surely yield a more in-depth history, and most decks (at least ones that are intended for mass consumption aka not made for specialist stores etc) already come with booklets about the cards and reading methods. There was nothing special provided by “The Tarot Lady.”

The idea of creating a book about illustrating decks is interesting, but the execution left a lot to be desired. Again, nothing special was provided. I found the ‘steps’ by the illustrator to be extremely elementary, and rather unnecessary, as well. It comes down to “create a theme and a colour scheme.” I truly expected something more — more interesting, more helpful, more fun. I personally did not like the custom illustrations for the cards, they look nice from afar, but up close they weren’t as refined.

I’m afraid the best thing about this book is the image quality, at least for an electronic format.

[DRC provided by Edelweiss and Walter Foster.]
252 reviews
May 23, 2022
Thank you to the publisher and to Netgalley for giving me this eARC to review.

Create Your Own Tarot is a great book that explains Tarot (major, minor, care for tarot. myths and truths) within the first half and then explores the creation of the deck. It gives ideas and shows the process of the cards with what materials are used and in which order. This has inspired me to make my own deck as I have wanted to for a while.


I will say that I am new to Tarot and I am still learning myself so this was very informative to me but it is always handy to use another resource to cross-reference meanings and such!
Profile Image for Krystina.
262 reviews12 followers
May 3, 2022
I was given an ARC of this book by NetGalley in exchange for my honest opinions.

The book was very interesting and started from a point of assuming you knew nothing about Tarot (and that possibly you weren't even aware it was a deck of cards) and I thought that was really good. It opens the book up to anyone regardless of your knowledge base and if you did know more you could easily skip ahead to the bits you wanted to know about.
I enjoyed the layout and generally thought it was a good book :)
Profile Image for Andrea Smith.
380 reviews8 followers
May 31, 2022
I enjoyed reading the history of Tarot and the breakdown of each card. I am new to Tarot, but for years I've felt inspired by the beautiful artwork depicted on each card. I appreciate how balanced this book is. It's informative when it needs to be, while providing your brain with a break, to process the brightly colored pictures. I've come up with a few ideas and look forward to trying them out.

Thank you, NetGalley and Quarto Publishing Group, for providing me with a digital ARC for an honest review.
Profile Image for Dodie.
840 reviews4 followers
October 27, 2022
3/5 stars

ok, I'm so glad that I didn't buy this book but got it from thee library. The book is suppose to show you how to make your own Tarot cards. This book does fall short. It starts of good mentioning that you need to think about your theme through out the deck but the author only shows her process for 20 cads of the whole tarot deck. I think it would have been better if the author focused on creating an oracle deck instead of a tarot deck.
Profile Image for Pixie.
658 reviews4 followers
May 8, 2024
This is divided into 2 parts, a very simplistic overview of tarot that you could find anywhere, then a few pages on each card (apparently colored with posca markers), where she obvs. cut and pasted the same 4-paragraph format to each. At no point does this little book delve into any exploration about how to create YOUR own cards. You just flip through and see hers. I can't even imagine how this would hold the interest of someone looking for a simple coloring exercise, much less anything else.
Profile Image for Meg Hendry.
Author 35 books5 followers
May 2, 2022
This guide to making your own tarot cards has a good layout and excellent pictures. The beginning of the book covers the basics of what tarot is, common misconceptions, and how to take care of your cards. The rest of the book covers how to make your own cards, with examples from the deck the author made.

I received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
899 reviews18 followers
January 21, 2023
An idea on how to create your own as you follow her journey in creating her own.picking your colour scheme and how you want to interpret the cards.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews

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