How to make your own tarot deck (idea to art)
To make your own tarot deck, decide on a theme, pick a structure (usually the 78-card tarot skeleton or a freeform oracle), sketch every card, choose a medium you can sustain for months, then paint the cards one by one to a consistent border and back. The art is the long part.
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Most first decks are not made in a weekend. Creators on r/TarotDecks talk in years, not weeks: "7 years start to finish" is a real, ordinary answer. This guide is about scope and pace, not a quick trick.
What does it take to make your own tarot deck?
Six real stages: concept, structure, sketches, medium, the pip decision, then the long haul of finished cards on a consistent border and back. None are hard alone. The difficulty is that the last stage repeats up to 78 times. Here is the arc, and the trap hiding in each step.
| Stage | What actually happens | The trap |
|---|---|---|
| Concept and theme | Pick the world, mood, and through-line the deck shares | A theme too vague to guide 78 cards, or too narrow to fill them |
| Structure | Choose 78-card tarot or an oracle of any count | Starting an oracle for "freedom," then drowning with nothing telling you what to draw |
| Sketching | Thumbnails and rough layouts for every card | Rendering card one before sketching the set, then hating your style at card 40 |
| Choosing a medium | Settle on watercolor, gouache, digital, pigment, or ink | A medium you can't repeat cleanly 78 times, or that prints muddy |
| The pip decision | Decide if the 40 pips are full scenes or minimal | Not deciding, and signing up for triple the paintings |
| Card by card | Paint the deck to a fixed border, title, and back | Drift: early and late cards look like two different decks |
Estimates here are planning guides, not promises. Your pace, medium, and pip choice swing the timeline by years.
Where do you start: concept and theme?
Before any card, decide what the deck is about. Not just "a tarot deck," but the specific world it lives in: a coastal folklore deck, one built from foraged earth pigments, a deck about your grandmother's garden. The theme is the rule that keeps 78 cards feeling like one object instead of 78 unrelated pictures.
A good theme is generative. When you hit the Ten of Swords or The Tower, a strong concept already suggests how it looks in your world. If it can't answer "what does The Devil look like here," it is too thin to carry the deck. Write it as a one-line statement and keep it where you paint.
Should you make a 78-card tarot or an oracle deck?
This structure decision sets your entire workload. A tarot deck is 78 cards in a fixed skeleton: 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana split into four suits. An oracle deck can be any count, any system, invented by you.
The counterintuitive part: the fixed tarot structure is usually easier for a first deck. The 78 slots tell you exactly what to draw next, from The Fool to the King of Pentacles. An oracle gives total freedom and, with it, the burden of inventing both the card list and its logic from nothing. For the full breakdown of majors, minors, courts, and pips, see the anatomy of a 78-card tarot deck. Decide this before you sketch, because it sets how many original paintings you have signed up for.
How do you sketch and plan the deck?
Thumbnail the whole set before you finish a single card. Small, rough, fast sketches of all 78 (or your oracle list) let you see the deck as a set, spot repetition, and catch that six of your majors are all a lone figure facing left. Rough in the shared layout too: where the title sits, where the number goes, how wide the border runs. Locking that grid now keeps card 3 and card 63 looking related.
Resist fully rendering card one. Makers who polish their first card to perfection usually outgrow that style by card 30, then repaint everything they finished early. Sketch wide, finish later.
Which medium should you use to make your deck?
Choose a medium you can repeat cleanly dozens of times, and that survives printing. Real decks get made in watercolour on 300gsm hot-pressed paper, in gouache, in ink, in fully digital work, and in foraged earth pigments and volcanic ash ground by hand. The question is not which is "best," it is which you can sustain to card 78 without your hand or budget giving out.
Two filters. Consistency: can you get the same look on a bad day as a good one? And print behaviour: fine linework softens on textured stock, and some pigments shift once scanned for print. The trade-offs are laid out in choosing your tarot deck art medium.
Full scenes or minimal pips?
The biggest workload decision inside a tarot deck is the 40 pip cards. In the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition, every pip is a full illustrated scene: the Five of Cups a grieving figure, the Ten of Wands a person bent under a bundle. Forty extra narrative paintings.
In the older Marseille approach, pips are arrangements of the suit symbol, five cups laid out like pips on a playing card. You design one clean layout and repeat it. That cuts your original-composition count from 78 to about 38 (22 majors plus 16 courts).
Neither is more correct. Plenty of respected modern decks keep pips minimal on purpose, for the classic look and a sane timeline. Just decide on purpose, because deciding by accident is how a two-year deck becomes a six-year one.
How do you keep 78 cards looking like one deck?
Lock a border, a titling scheme, and a card back early, then hold them constant: border width, corner style, font, and where the number and name sit. A deck where the majors have one border and the minors another looks unfinished even when every card is well painted.
The card back is the highest-stakes single piece of art in the deck. It appears on all 78 cards, so it must work at any orientation and never reveal which way a card faces, or you break reversals for every reader who uses them.
How do you actually make your own tarot deck without quitting?
You make it one card at a time, on a pace you can hold for years. The finish line is genuinely emotional: "The Fool is finally finished" is the kind of thing people post when a deck that ate years of their life is done.
Work in passes, not perfection. Sketch all, then ink all, then colour all, so the deck advances as a set and your style stays even. Track which cards are done and which are empty so the scope stays visible. For a realistic sense of the calendar, see how long it takes to make a tarot deck. Only then does the deck become a product: files, printing, a guidebook, and selling, all covered in how to self-publish a tarot deck.
Frequently asked questions
How many cards do you need to make a tarot deck?
A full tarot deck is 78 cards: 22 Major Arcana plus 56 Minor Arcana (four suits of ten pips and four court cards each). An oracle deck has no fixed count and can be any number you choose.
Do you need to be able to draw to make your own tarot deck?
You need consistent art in some medium, but it need not be traditional illustration. Decks are made in watercolour, collage, photography, printmaking, and digital work. Consistency across the cards matters more than raw drawing skill.
How long does it take to make a tarot deck?
Most hand-illustrated decks take one to several years. Creators regularly report two, five, even seven years start to finish, depending on medium, detail, and whether the pips are fully illustrated.
Should my first deck be a tarot or an oracle?
A 78-card tarot is often easier because the fixed structure tells you what to draw next. An oracle gives more freedom but forces you to invent the entire card list and its logic yourself. The hardest part of either is finishing every card at a consistent quality, since style drift and burnout around the 40 pips are where most decks stall.
The honest bottom line
Making your own tarot deck is a few decisions followed by a lot of patient painting. Get the theme, structure, medium, and pip scope right up front, lock your border and back, then paint one card at a time on a pace you can actually keep.
When the paintings are done, Foolmade gives your deck a home: make a free deck page that lays out all 78 slots so you can see what is finished and what is still empty. Foolmade never prints your deck or generates art. Every card stays yours, made by hand.