Art Direction: Sean McCabe

The brief for this particular project was fairly simple, illustrate 8 tarot cards based on anything; a movie, a particular theme, or create something wholly original. I was to pick 4 cards from the major arcana and 4 from the minor arcana, while also designing the backs of the cards. As an avid fan the music and films of Rob Zombie, I chose to base my cards off of his debt film, House of 1000 Corpses. I saw this movie as a child (probably shouldn’t have hahaha) and it’s just one of those films that freaked me out then but now I love it. I felt very uneasy about coloring these digitally. I was rather fatigued with being on the computer and so I decided that I would color these by hand with marker and colored pencils.  The backgrounds for each card are separate gradients that were made by hand and scanned in with minor adjustments in Photoshop.

I kind of relish having limitations. The markers I was using are a mix of old crayola and off-brand markers from my childhood that I snagged from my mom’s house and some prismacolor markers and pencils that my girlfriend had. The point being that I didn’t have every single pantone color at my disposal nor did I need it. I had to work around that limitation and that made the project all the more fun.

Baby as the Queen of Swords

Otis as The Hierophant

The way I came up with the backside of the cards was by utilizing old engravings of bones as a frame; to reference the actual House of 1000 Corpses that appears in the film. The middle sesction was created with a sort of carnival theme in mind, being that the film is so theatrical and over the top and many references to carnivals can be seen all throuought its runtime. The skull in the center is a nod to Zombie’s style of filmaking; there constant negative overlays of archival footage and b-roll laced within the film.