why won't this show up?
Why woodcut, not the velvet-and-candles tarot everyone expects?
Most tarot art is trying very hard to look mysterious. Mine refused to even try.
When I started the cards, the default was right there: ornate borders, jewel tones, robed figures gazing into the middle distance — the velvet-and-rhinestone, incense-and-candlelight look. It’s a whole genre, people love it, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But every time I mocked it up, one word kept surfacing: costume. It looked like mystery dressed up for a photo — performing sacred instead of being it. And the instant something looks like it’s performing, the spell breaks.
So I went the other way entirely. Woodcut. Old-print roughness, parchment, type that looks like it survived a few centuries rather than getting spat out of a logo generator last week — I landed on IM Fell English for exactly that. It reads as found, not designed.
The principle underneath is the whole thing: mystery doesn’t come from ornament. It comes from age and restraint. You don’t decorate the sacred — you let it look used. A woodcut implies a hand, a tool, someone who made this a long time ago for reasons they took seriously. Polish implies a brand meeting. One invites you to believe; the other invites you to admire. I wanted belief.
That’s the between-the-notes part — the choice nobody can name but everybody feels. Show two people the glossy version and the woodcut, and they can’t tell you why one feels real and the other feels like a Halloween aisle. They just know. That gap is where every taste decision you’ll ever make actually lives.
So when you’re choosing how a thing looks, sounds, reads — don’t pick the option that looks expensive. Pick the one that looks unearthed.