Not every project goes smoothly 100% of the time. The LEGO Tarot was no exception - there were several false starts and some outright rejected ideas.
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First Up was the first card created, 0-The Fool.
At left you can see how the initial concept of the deck - LEGO on computer generated "artsy" backgrounds - was abandoned for the final "reality based" background art.
The change between the second and third card shows the tweaking of the scale of the figure. |
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The second card to undergo major revisions was XIII - Death. The initial version of the card focused on the LEGO figure to the exclusion of all else. Not much in the spirit of Rider-Waite, this was a deliberate departure to see if alternate iconography was going to be what I wanted to see out of the deck. While it was a very neat image, it wasn't really representative of the meaning of the Death card.
The second card shows the revised concept - much closer to Rider-Waite, Also note the different graphics on the skull - I used the "happier" skull from pre-Alpha Team sets to soft-sell the upbeat nature of the card.
The final card shows the revisions on color balance - the flower imagery was overpowering the foreground, so I adjusted the alpha on it to give it about a 50% see-through value. |
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Not much to explain here, just demonstrating that one image could be used in several different cards. The original intent was for Yoda to fit into the court cards of the swords suit as The Knight of Swords.
But, upon further reflection (and the decision to include licensed characters into the major arcana), I realized that he would fit much better as IX - The Hermit. The image is unchanged between the two cards. |
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Very little is changed between these two versions of the Knight of Wands. The major difference is that I adjusted the color balance to make the card much lighter.
This was the card that demonstrated that the monitor I was using to design the cards on was much brighter than any of the other monitors I owned, and much brighter than just about any monitor I had access to. After this point, the cards being developed were much brighter, and most of the earlier cards got a face lift. |
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The Three of Swords is a card that made me very glad that I had people editing my work. First, they pointed out that the first image was still too dark. Second, they were unable to identify the object in the upper left. "Is it a bridge?"
The revised card on the right shows the fleeing mini-figure in much greater detail, as well as back in the sunshine. |
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The Six of Wands underwent a slight revision dealing with the scale of the figure. Mostly, though, it was an attempt to get rid of some of the flash-washout seen in the first version on the left. |
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The High Priestess also underwent a minor revision, again fighting for better focus and lighting. |
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The Eight of Wands started out as a clone of the Rider-Waite deck, a fairly unimaginative card, graphically speaking. I was so annoyed by this, when compared with the complexity of the other Wands, that I switched to a Quiddich scene. |
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