Daily tarot drawing, Month 1

I have been drawing a tarot card every day for the past month.

Long before starting this drawing project, I’ve been pulling a tarot card every morning as a way to set my intention for the day. I don’t treat tarot as a divination tool; it’s more of a self-reflection framework to see how each card’s archetypal energy might relate to something in my life. I love the rich symbology in tarot, and to be honest I have yet to venture beyond the classic Rider Waite Smith imagery. This deck alone has so many years worth of material that I would like to keep studying.

I first ventured into drawing my daily tarot cards last year, in tiny boxes at the bottom of a Traveler’s Notebook weekly vertical journal. Though I gave up that practice a few months in, I have been itching to combine my tarot study with my illustration practice. I sought the container of the daily project to help me befriend repetition as a methodology for devotion.

So began my daily drawing project—a tarot card illustration each day to capture the card I pulled. Most of my illustrations are a simplified version of the RWS deck imagery, which allows me to feasibly finish a card every day. One month in, I am feeling really optimistic about completing my daily project. There are 78 cards in total and I’ve completed 30 so far, so I’m about 40% of the way there!

I have started many daily drawing projects over the years. Some projects fizzled by the second week (or day!) and others were successfully completed according to the parameters I’ve set. When I reflect on the projects I gave up on, the failure usually boils down to having too high expectations and not enough clarity of constraints.

Tips for a daily drawing project

Clarify your specific intention

The hardest part of starting a daily project is determining a specific why that can carry you through the project. I know the most obvious reason is to “get better at drawing”, but I find this intention remains too vague for sustained dedication.

Are you looking to develop a certain skill or technique? Do you want to use up your art materials? Are you working on your visual language for landscapes or people? By anchoring on a specific intention, you can let go of all other expectations for your project to fulfill.

For my tarot drawing project, I wanted to work in a new drawing style on my iPad that better reflected how I work in analog. I swapped the Procreate linework brushes I usually use with a gouache brush and a marker pen. So far I am really satisfied with how these drawings are looking more like my traditional work!

One caveat I want to give is that if you’d like your daily project to improve on technique, your project work may not necessarily look cohesive. This is something I felt for both my monthlong sketchbook project and Peachtober 2022 project. I intended to improve my painting skills and successfully created some of my favorite individual artworks during this time—but when I look at the pieces all together, the body of work looks quite random.

Contrast this with a project like Peachtober 2021, where I used the same duck character in each painting. This made the project feel like a series, but I definitely wasn’t pushing my artistic development every day.

All this to say—your project cannot fulfill all of your creative desires. Hone in on the qualities that matter to you most right now, and release your grip on the rest!

Add constraints wherever possible

As rewarding as it can be to do a daily project, it will certainly get exhausting on some days. This is why I highly recommend making as many decisions upfront through project constraints, so that you can sit down and start drawing without hemming and hawing about what and where and how. So much of adulting comprises of constantly making decisions—let your project remain a playful, childlike zone by having your adult self make the decisions in advance.

Some constraints I suggest are creating in the same size (e.g. a 5x5” piece of paper), using a limited set of colors (or even just one color), and working in the same medium. You can go further and add constraints to your subject matter (e.g. 30 days of drawing self-portraits) or time (30 minutes of filling a sketchbook page).

Lastly, make sure you set an end date that feels reasonable to you. If the time frame is ambitious, like a 100 day project, lower the bar for your daily output. If you’re trying your first daily project, I recommend a two or four week challenge so the completion date isn’t so far. You can always keep going after the set timeframe if you’re up for it!

Do a trial to get an idea of how long a day’s drawing will take

You may have a grand vision of taking however long it takes to finish your project each day, but the impossible nature of this expectation will quickly settle in as other life duties take over.

Some of my tarot drawings take 30 minutes, while others take 90 minutes. When I am extra busy and pull a detailed tarot card that will take more time to draw, I will shuffle and re-pull from my deck for a simpler card. Is that cheating? Maybe! But I’d rather make my daily drawing by bending my own rules than skip it altogether.

To craft a daily project that you can actually keep up with, get a sense first of how long it will take to complete one day’s drawing. Test drive making one of your drawings, and assume that time frame will be on the lower end of how long each day’s drawing will take. My former software engineering brain advises doubling your daily time estimate for scheduling purposes.

If you already know the time you spent is unfeasible to maintain, think of ways you can simplify or shrink your process, colors, or canvas size. Or, you can divide up the drawing process into two days so you work on a sketch one day and the final drawing on the next.

Create a tracker

I’m a big believer in giving yourself gold stars! The brain responds really well to gamification to feel a sense of progress (hence the popularity of Duolingo streaks).

In previous daily projects like my monthlong sketchbook challenge, I created an analog tracker so I can feel the satisfaction of adding a checkmark each day. My tarot project of 78 cards feels too big for a physical tracker, so I set up a page in Notion instead. I prefer this overview to get a sense of which cards are remaining.

Share in a lowkey container

Much of the fun of creating a daily project is in sharing the process. Sharing publicly is not a requirement, of course, but I find it super encouraging to witness other people’s excitement about the project and give people a peek into the process as the drawings start to stack up and become a full body of work.

Sharing can become a double-edged sword if we notice that we’re giving too much credence to its reception and letting that shape our own relationship to the project. Some ways to mitigate this is to use a less charged platform, or to share in weekly batches instead of daily.

While I used to share my past daily projects on Instagram, for this tarot project I’ve been sharing on Substack Notes and in other small online communities. Both of these platforms don’t have as much reach, so I am less distracted by the metrics of it all.

Prepare for impending pressure and resist temptation

I saved my most important tip for last! If you have a squiggly creative + anxious brain like mine, you will feel the temptation to make your project bigger and better as you progress. Or you might start beating yourself up about something you find lacking in your process or output.

During my monthlong illustration challenge for Peachtober 2022, I was placing so many heavy expectations on my art. I wanted to make better paintings, and find it joyful and fun, and make my project a cohesive series. It was all too much, and I ended up throwing in the towel when I got sick halfway through the month.

During moments of doubt or comparison, return to the specific intention you set in the beginning. I’ve been having to do this for my tarot project, when I sometimes get in my head about whether my output is good enough to make a deck (not a goal I had at the start!) or if I am adding enough of my own interpretation (also not a goal I am ready for—maybe in round two). Since my original intention was to draw tarot in my style on the iPad, I am trying my best to anchor onto that intention and clear out any other expectations.

Though some daily projects might end up becoming a commercialized product, the true gift of a project like this is in its process-oriented nature. If you decide to embark on a daily drawing project of your own, look for the alchemy in the mundanity of doing. Find the magic in the repetition. This is all there is.