Welcome to the Mystic Deck´s Creator's Blog. This blog covers tarot topics from practice to deck designs and the design process. As for my background, I am a multidisciplinary cultural professional: an industrial designer, graphic designer, and 3D artist by education, currently working in digital marketing for a design company. I graduated from an art school and have taken numerous online and real-life art courses. Of all the traditional media, I love working with oil paints and charcoals the most. Additionally, when I stopped working as a 3D artist, I slowly drifted into sculpting and AI.
The decks featured on this site are a joint effort of AI and hand-illustrated digital art, blending technology with traditional artistry to create unique and captivating designs.
So why tarot cards with the help of AI?
I had been thinking about creating a tarot deck for a few years. I had used an Aleister Crowley Thoth deck for over 23 years, and from the moment I acquired it at age 20, it was love at first sight. The precision and connection the cards provided during a reading were indescribable.
I started using AI a few years ago, and this year everything fell into place. AI had developed enough to help me complete my project. What fascinated me about AI was its ability to access tarot knowledge and symbols in seconds. I was curious to see what elements it would bring to our decks. AI's way of "seeing" the world, like a toddler with an unfinished perspective, was intriguing. There were many "mistakes" in the cards that I loved. AI couldn't count and didn't understand what it saw, so a hand could turn into a foot, and there were always too many fingers and limbs joined in the wrong places. A good example was the Major Arcana XII's Hanged Man card, where the man was hanging by his leg, attached in an unusual spot. These mistakes transported me to a surreal, dreamlike existence, which I loved the most. Some of these errors I fixed by hand during post-production, while others I left as they were.
Working with the AI
Working with AI may seem like just the push of a button, but it's actually a challenging and meticulous process. Verbal prompts are often misunderstood, and creating a single card can require dozens of re-renderings and refinements. Additionally, AI programs are not free; generating high-resolution images incurs genuine costs. Typically, I provide specific verbal instructions for the images, such as "a man with a sword picking flowers," "a lily pad," or "an esoteric symbol," while also allowing the AI some creative freedom.
Please view this tarot deck as a work of art that invites you to explore your inner mind. The proportions and construction of the card illustrations are intentionally not based on realism. I have deliberately left some errors in the cards during post-processing to maintain their unique, surreal quality.
This deck is a collaboration between Tarot enthusiast and machine - I also like to think of all the entities outside our own dimension that may have been involved in the process of energetically influencing the content of the cards. All life on earth is energy and they say the spirit world, for example, can use technology to communicate better with us. When I think about the moment when the idea of AI and tarot cards came into my mind it was a very sudden, random thought in my ear: like a whisper from outside. So there are many layers and many different consciousnesses in this deck. I hope you enjoy the cards as much as I enjoy creating their artificial layers.
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