Almost every artist at some point has experienced the pain of art block and felt like they were not improving no matter what they do. When I felt myself run into that wall and felt like my art wasn’t improving, I felt like I had to step out of my comfort zone if I wanted to.

I thought about making Tarot cards when I drew this:

I didn’t have prior inspiration for doing Tarot cards for this learning process and instead just thought about doing it when I finished this drawing. I’ve always loved looking at art created using no line art and this drawing was my intro into doing that.

As I would scroll through art on Pinterest and Instagram, I would take note of details I enjoyed in styles and what I would want to try and improve using them.

The Star

For this card, “The Star”, I wanted to try soft shading and took inspiration from an artist I discovered on Instagram who used green when shading their art. I did decide to use line art for this drawing as I had traced over a drawing that I had created earlier that day. I hadn’t even intended for this drawing to be “The Star” until I was almost finished with it.

Death

When creating “Death, I wanted to stay with using green to shade while not doing any line art. I experimented with a few different poses before I was happy with this one. I also used colors with less saturation than I did for “The Star” to keep it a bit in theme with the darkness of “Death”.

The Moon

For “The Moon”, I started experimenting with different brushes and took interest in a brush that had the texture of a paintbrush. A few days prior to drawing this, I had seen a drawing someone made of a girl standing on water with a bird as the reflection. I used that drawing as inspiration when working on this I also worked to incorporate texture.

The Fool

For “The Fool”, I decided to take a step back into doing line art and worked with using different layer modes and styles. I chose a single color for shading and used a multiply layer to shade. I started taking note of where I had the lighting coming from and wanted to make it consistent.

I plan on creating all 22 of the Major Arcana Tarot cards using different techniques and then doing simple designs for the final 56 Minor Arcana. After I’ve completed all 78 cards, I’m going to make a Tarot card box and a card back to wrap up this personal project of mine.

What sort of things do you do when you can’t tap into your creativity?

Thanks for reading and be sure to watch out for my next post!