How To Make Tarot Card Props

Tarot cards are often used in possession horror as they link to religion and the connection to the dead. They are also good for foreshadowing future scenarios of a film (such as a death) or can provide a red herring to mislead the audience into thinking something will happen but the cards were wrong.

I took inspiration from The Possession of Michael King as the main character gets a tarot card reading.

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I attempted to make my own tarot cards and this is how I did it

I used:

• One sheet of plain white card
• Pencil
• Tea
• Black pen
• Scissors / Paper Guillotine 
• 5p coin

How to make the cards

I decided to only make 4 cards to test my methods so I chose the four darkest cards with the most negative themes. These are: Death, Devil, Hanged Man and Fool

1. Measure and mark the card at 3.5 inches long and 2.1 inches wide. (You should get around 10 cards from 1 A4 Sheet) and cut each of the cards out

2. (Optional) Place your 5p (or equivalent size coin) on the corner so it just touches the sides of the coin then draw round it. Then use scissors to cut along this line. 

      

             

This gives the cards rounded corners. You can leave them square however I rounded them to make them seem more realistic.

 3.  Now draw a box like this on one side of the card and add a roman numeral on the top box and match it with a card name at the bottom.

4. Now draw the unique diagram for each card in the middle of the box

XIII - Death

XV - The Devil

0 - Fool

XII - Hanged Man

 5. Now turn each of the cards over and draw any pattern. I researched different patterns online and found this to be the easiest one to draw by hand

6. Put a teabag in a cup of boiling water and let it brew for a minute. Then place the soaked teabag on tissue and let it drain as much as possible. When it is cool enough, squeeze the majority of the tea out. 

 7. Carefully dab the teabag on each card (DO NOT WIPE AS THIS WILL ERASE THE PENCIL AND DAMAGE THE PAPER)

8. (Optional) Then go back over the lines with a black fineliner to make them stand out 

Finished Cards

I experimented burning the sizes however this made it look less like a tarot card

Evaluation

     What went well:

• Size of the cards
• Diagrams looks convincing
• Looked fairly realistic

    What could be improved?

• The tea made the card weaker so it curled slightly, so I could have used thicker card
• Could have gone over the diagrams with a thin fineliner so they stood out
• The cards could have been cut neater

Overall, I think the cards look convincing but not convincing enough to use in a film and you can tell they are hand made. Plus it took a long time just to make four