In recent years I discovered that there is a belief that art can manifest things into being. I’ve read that this is also possible with writing. The Scottish graphic novelist Grant Morrison, in interviews, mentioned that he would find himself in the same kind of strange situations he would write about in his comic books shortly after penning them and putting them out into the world. It could be argued that some of these situations may have become self fulfilling prophecies. An example would be if you wrote about being out in the Mohave Desert and getting into trouble with a bunch of scorpions and after writing about it, flew out to the Mohave, wandered around for a few days and got stung by a scorpion. Naturally if you put yourself in that position it’s more likely to happen. If you wrote a fictional story about yourself winning the lottery, there’s obviously more chance of your “fiction” manifesting in real life if you bought a lottery ticket. In some ways these instances could be explained away as slightly self fulfilling, but there are other times when it seems we can say something out loud, write something, or even draw something and eventually it happens without really intending it to happen.

I know that sounds bizarre, but thoughts of Leif Erikson, Erik the Red and Columbus came to me and I wondered about the natives that lived there. I thought about the pilgrims who first stepped foot off the Mayflower. I went to the Appalachian festival and met people who lived in or around the mountains. That carried through to the next year, when I visited the U.S again. This time I was on a plane flight home from the U.S and I was flying over Greenland. Seeing the snow peaked mountains in the distance, all the way to the southern coast where you saw icebergs floating around in the sea surrounding it.

About 2 years later I drew a self portrait of myself studying a map of Ireland and the UK. It was more a representation of the fact that a lot of my communications with people happened to be through the internet and the frustration that comes with that as a young person. (continued below)

It would be a further six years later before I got a call from Art Ward, a member of my local town’s community group. Art asked if I would be interested in applying to illustrate the town map. So I applied and got the job. Now the town map can be seen throughout the town in four outdoor areas and also inside the tourist centre. The map can also be found inside the brochure which is available in many places throughout town. Some years there are close to a million visitors visiting the area from all around the world, and you can imagine it gives me great happiness to see foreigners using my illustrated map.

We’ve had Japanese customers, and we’ve had customers from California buying our tarot decks, and Japanese and American tourists have picked up our illustrated town brochures here in Ireland. Without an exaggeration I can say my artwork has travelled to or been seen by people from the four corners of the earth.

The next strange thing to happen was the following. As family members often do, they’ll ask you if you’re working on any new projects, or what you’re currently working on now. This particular family member was not impressed that I had been working on a tarot deck, which I completely understand. From a religious perspective, most tarotists already know that most Christians do not look too kindly on anything tarot related, and this family member was very interested in working his way up in the church. Knowing this, and knowing his reaction from the first deck, I didn’t think there was much point in mentioning something that you know beforehand is going to annoy them. At the time I was working on the second Tarot deck, Simply Deep, and I knew that by my mentioning work on a second deck, it would ruin the mood. Who wants to ruin the mood at a family get together if they can avoid it? So I did what anyone would do in that situation who wasn’t really working on anything other than the thing they can’t mention…I told him I was working on a children’s book for someone in Rhode Island. It was a lie of course, and yes, part of me feels bad about it, but I also didn’t want to say I’m working on nothing. For my family, working on nothing would be as bad as working on a Tarot deck! So why Rhode Island? Why the tiniest state in the U.S? Your guess is as a good as mine.

Again, this may be a coincidence but out of all of the states in the U.S I’ve never worked on a children’s book in any one of them, except for Texas, and that was years before I’d told my little white lie to my family member regarding Rhode Island. It remains to be seen if I actually do illustrate this lady’s children’s books, but I really hope so. If she still wants me to do so, it will be after the project I am currently working on for her.

Welcome to Part 3, the final part to our Horror Tarot card connections. Please ignore the error in that #13 should really have read #12 and so on.

Click here to see Part 2, and here to see Part 1.

So here is number 11. Here's Serina the Sword Swallower piercing through to the Creepy Pasta inspired Jeff the Killer character in the Knight of Swords

Here's our Sheriff Justice card with the Alternative Hanged Man. How's that for bagging a man! How's that for roping a man in to do the dishes lol

Here's our Sheriff Justice again. She's managed to rope in a volunteer to give her a helping hand!

The Sword Swallower in the 2 of Swords pierces through into the Hanged Man card with its severed hand.

The High Priestess gets a hair raising experience as a jolt of electricity shoots through her from the castle. Perhaps she'll volunteer for Frankenstein's bride!

If you'd like to get a deck of our horror themed Twisted Tarot Tales for yourself, click here to visit the store, or watch the video below to see the cards in action.

If you have any card connections of your own, please share it with us in the comments below. We're only showing the connections we've found personally!

Welcome to Part 2 of our Horror Tarot card connections, where we show you the the card combinations we've found so far in the deck. Many intuitive card readers find borderless cards helpful because often they create the kind of free flowing narrative where bordered cards, by their design, cannot.

Click here for Part 1

We continue with number 6 below, where we see the 3 of Pentacles merge with the Lovers card through the "swoosh". In the 3 of Pentacles we see a kind of mist as the spooky monster comes to life from the comic artist's drawing table. Though a simple mist in the 3 of Pentacles, it becomes the speed lines of the car crash in the Lovers card.

In example 7 we see the Sun card, when turned upside down, connects to the Queen of Pentacles. The sun rays merge  with the spotlights pointing to the gold loving 50 ft woman robbing Fort Knox.

Here we see our zombie hunting Granny G merge with the 7 of swords by means of the zombie hordes. While their color differs somewhat, we see in the foreground that the hands extend into the Romero's grocery store scene.

In example 9 below we see a corn connection. The mutant Satanto crop reaches the shelves of the supermarket in our Empress card, and here it is growing in the fields. Through the crop, through nutrition, we see a connection in the Empress and Knight of Pentacles card.

Here is a great example of how the cards occassionally connect vertically. the 2 of Swords and Alternative Hanged Man. While she holds two swords in the 2 of Swords card, it could be read as a rope, a connection to a net holding a powerless man. (or is he powerless? If only he'd reach for that knife at his side and cut himself free)

Did you enjoy these card connections? Click here to see part 3. our final installment of our Horror themed Twisted Tarot Tales card connections!

If you'd like to get a deck of our horror themed Twisted Tarot Tales for yourself, click here to visit the store, or watch the video below to see the cards in action.

If you have any card connections of your own, please share it with us in the comments below. We're only showing the connections we've found personally!

Here's Part 1 of our Horror themed card connections. These were totally random instances were the cards seem to blend to create two scenes, sometimes almost seamlessly. First up is the alternative version Ace of Coins and our Lust card.

Next is the 5 of Swords and the Alternative King of Swords. The lighthouse beam shines across into the streetlights in the alt King of Swords

Here we have the 5 of Swords again, this time with the Knight of Wands, only this time the lighthouse beam meets the sun.

One of my favorites. The badly defeated man in the 2 of Pentacles reaches into the Ace of Cups through the Television in the hopes of snatching the little girl's popcorn! Yipes

The next set sees another play on the "hand reaching through the TV screen". Maybe the man in the Alt 8 of Cups card wants to feed the giant rat some popcorn!

Did you enjoy these? Want to see more? Of course you do! Click here for part 2

If you'd like to get a deck of our horror themed Twisted Tarot Tales for yourself, click here to visit the store, or watch the video below to see the cards in action.

If you have any card connections of your own, please share it with us in the comments below. We're only showing the connections we've found personally!

Coming from an agricultural background I admit it interests me to see these "farming cards" come together. On the edge of the King we partly see a combine harvester and in the 7 we see workers in the background with a few tractors.

If I had to sum it up I'd say that the best deck for reading about work and job prospects is the Chinese Propaganda Art Tarot because much of the focus is on manual labour jobs.  Yes, this deck does have more of a revolutionary / communist leaning than any of our other work due to the nature of the real life artworks we based the imagery on, but the amount of cards depicting work make it a great deck for reading about jobs, income and so on.

In the set of three cards below from the Chinese Propaganda Art Tarot, we see a water theme flowing through three of the cards. (Blog continues after the image)

Below we see the 6 of wands and the Temperance card, who just so happen to merge due to their brick walls.

The Art in the Chinese Propaganda Art mostly depicts a dreamy idealistic view of a communist China under Mao, and while many may disagree with the reality of the actual events of the Cultural Revolution during that time, this is a dreamy idyllic deck. It's overly optimistic because it is based on overly optimistic Propaganda. Lot's of smiley faces all round!

The Chinese Propaganda Art Tarot is not without its share of morbid cards, such is the nature of life and the time period the propaganda art is based on. Below we see the 4 of Swords combine with the 4 of Pentacles. In the 4 of Swords we see a barefoot doctor administer healing to a wounded soldier. I love this card because it combines a range of occupations; medic, soldier, and farmers (in the background). The card can combine with the 4 of Pentacles through the tree, where we see it branch into the pentacles card. In our card we see healing, even feeding through the bowl of water/soup/medicine, to starvation in the pentacles card connected to it.

Occasionally those concerns are deep. Some have deep emotional scars. Some have physical scars. We don't claim to be counsellors, but we supply the tools that help the counsellors in the same way a brick maker may not know how to draw out the blue prints for a house, but without him or her, the house simply wouldn't be.

Want to see our current sent of card connections for Twisted Tarot Tales? Click here to see what we've found

This is a great deck to pull out and read with when a client's issues can't be sugar-coated, and can't be ignored. Even the lovers card has an ironic twist with the lovers involved in a sort of "crash and burn" scenario. It's not a deck for everybody, and it wasn't supposed to be. Art is like food, or music; it’s a matter of taste. It also depends on what kind of clients you have and what way you conduct your readings.

A few people have called Twisted Tarot Tales an excellent tool for shadow work and working through personal issues.

Here's a video that we made earlier in the year when we released Twisted Tarot Tales.