What I Learned Creating 22 Tarot Archetypes by Hand

This deck was never just about cards.

It started on a beach in Molokaʻi, Hawai’i. I was in the middle of a 7-day vision quest guided by a shaman who worked with the Major Arcana to unlock subconscious patterning. No food. Just water, a tent, and the land. No distractions. Just presence, breath, and the wilderness of my own mind.

Images began to surface. Patterns. Archetypes. I started to understand how my inner landscapes had formed through the same language the tarot offered. Not as a system of prediction, but of revelation. The cards weren’t external symbols — they were reflections of what had always been within me.

That’s where this began. Not with a goal or a plan. But with insight. With the kind of clarity that only silence can offer.

The 22 archetypes I created were drawn entirely by hand, using fine-point stippling—millions of dots and hundreds of hours. But what emerged was far more than ink.

It was a mirror.

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The Major Arcana as a Map of My Own Initiation

When I continued this work months later, I had just gone through a life-altering experience: cancer. I had lost a testicle and confronted mortality in a very real, visceral way. There’s something about facing the edge that changes how you see form. How you perceive light and shadow. How you hold duality.

Each archetype I drew became a reflection of what I was moving through, both emotionally and spiritually.

The Fool taught me to walk forward anyway.
The Tower arrived as everything I thought I knew collapsed.
Death, of course, showed up exactly when I needed to release old versions of myself.

But the cards didn’t just speak to endings. They marked openings, too.

By the time I completed the final card in the 22, I met Julia — my beloved, my co-creator, and the mother of our daughter. Her presence marked a threshold I hadn’t yet walked through: the world of deep relational alchemy.

Her knowledge of the Spanish tarot, her intuitive fluency with the minor arcana, and her years of transmission through archetypal reading opened an entirely new chapter for me.

Where I had built a foundation through the majors, she invited me into the nuance, the emotional architecture, the fine gradients of the human experience through the minors. Together, we began dreaming into the next body of work — one that would weave both of our strengths, stories, and visions.

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What the Creative Process Revealed

This deck taught me how to hold paradox. How to sit with discomfort. How to make space for mystery.

I didn’t rush it. I couldn’t.

Some cards took weeks. Others flowed in a couple nights. Each one asked me to get out of the way and let something deeper come through. I studied traditional symbolism, but never copied. I let the archetype show me how it wanted to appear.

This is not a deck meant to impress. It’s meant to *reveal*.

To open a conversation with the subconscious. To invite the reader (and me) into a dialogue with their deeper knowing.

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Creating as Healing

Through the act of creating these 22 archetypes, I began to reconstruct my own identity. As a man. As an artist. As a partner. As a father.

It became a slow rebirth.

Art has always been a language for me — one that bypasses the intellect and speaks directly to what lives beneath. This project reminded me of the power of long-form devotion. Of showing up, even when I had no idea how it would turn out.

And in doing so, it gave me something I never expected: closure. And also, beginning.

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Want to explore the archetypes with me?
→ \[View the deck] or \[Work with me 1:1]

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