TAROT CARDS

Freshman year of college, the prompt for the final project of my color theory class was:
a series of works that either studied color or shape & incorporated a textual element.
I decided to focus on color as a means to differentiate between characters or ideas in different Major Arcana Tarot Cards. I was only able to make these six, but I’m planning on continuing this project someday, and hopefully making a whole deck.

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The High Priestess

This Major Arcana card represents not only female power, but also the duality of the world; good and evil, light and dark, stable and unstable, negative and positive.

When it is pulled out of the deck upright, this card represents intuition, mystery, spirituality, higher power, and inner voice. When it is reversed, it can mean repressed intuition, hidden motives, superficiality, confusion, and cognitive dissonance.

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The Hermit

The Hermit Card is the ninth Major Arcana Card in a tarot deck. In the first and most widely-accepted deck, drawn by Pamela Coleman Smith, the Hermit is depicted as an old man standing alone on a mountain, with a six-pointed star as a light to guide his way, which is a symbol that represents wisdom, while the staff that holds it represents authority and power.

When this card is pulled upright from the deck, it represents introspection, contemplation, withdrawal, solitude, and the search for self. Reversed, this card represents loneliness, isolation, anti-social tendencies, rejection, and returning to society after being reclusive.

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Death

Contrary to its ominous name, the Death card can be quite a hopeful omen. Death is invincible—everyone and everything succumbs to it—but it is also a purifier, and indiscriminate in choosing its victims.

This card, when pulled from the deck upright, symbolizes transformation, endings, transition, moving on, and release. When reversed, this card represents fear of change, the repetition of negative patterns, resistance to change, stagnancy, and decay.

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The Devil

The fifteenth Major Arcana Card, the Devil, is used to represent the feeling of being trapped by “sinful” wants, such as a want for materialistic objects or an addiction to “the finer things” in life. It also represents a different kind of isolation from the Hermit card, because this isolation is a by-product of addiction or gluttony.

When pulled upright, this card symbolizes oppression, addiction, obsession, dependency, excess, powerlessness, and limitations. When reversed, this card represents independence, freedom, revelation, release, reclaiming power, and reclaiming control.

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The Moon

The Moon Card is the eighteenth Major Arcana Card, and represents a hidden truth that must be discovered. It can also indicate a need for self-reflection as well as the thin line between the conscious and the unconscious.

When pulled upright, this card symbolizes illusion, intuition, uncertainty, confusion, complexity, secrets, and the unconscious. If reversed, it represents fear, deception, anxiety, misunderstanding, misinterpretation, clarity, and understanding.

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The Sun

The Sun, the nineteenth Major Arcana Card, is the embodiment of optimism. The Sun is the new light at the end of a long night, bringing new life and new energy. It is a the promise of tomorrow, and hopeful.

If this card is pulled upright, it represents happiness, success, optimism, vitality, joy, confidence, and truth. If reversed, it can mean blocked happiness, excessive enthusiasm, pessimism, unrealistic expectations, and conceitedness.

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