now that the school year’s over, i figured i’d get around to uploading work that i’d held off on posting for one reason or another–this was an independent study project, a tarot deck based around the evolutionary history of life on earth, which i’d meant to post when i finished the card border designs but now i just figure WHAT THE HELL.  since i did it over the course of wintersession, our tiny 5-week semester, i only ended up doing finished illustrations for five of the major arcana cards, but i’d love to do an entire deck someday, suites included…sighs wistfully

suffice it to say without rambling too much about my illustrations and metaphorical choices for these, i tried to roughly match the order of the major arcana cards to the chronology of life on earth, choosing organisms and events that i felt best matched the symbolism of their respective cards (admittedly having to stretch the meanings a bit sometimes, hahah) and drawing heavily on the imagery of the classic Rider-Waite deck.

(oh yeah, and i know i took some pretty glaring artistic license with anachronisms and anatomical/scale inaccuracies in some of these, SO DON’T LAMBAST ME TOO HARD…)