Midnight Garden Tarot
by Sushila Burgess

The Midnight Garden Tarot is based on the line drawings of my Hinted Tarot colouring books. I had a black-and-white poker-size deck experimentally printed out from the Hinted Tarot drawings, but when I saw it, I realised it needed colour in order to work as a deck.

For over two and a half years, I spent quite a lot of my spare time colouring the 78 cards using Sharpies, which are the only type of pen or paint that works on the slippery surface of the printed cards. In fact Sharpies work extremely well, as their ink stays wet for a while on the shiny surface, allowing different colours to be mixed and blurred together almost like water-colour paints.

I am offering the original hand-coloured deck for sale on Etsy, but I scanned the cards before putting the original deck on sale, and am using those scans with an added colourful border as the basis of the Midnight Garden Tarot.

This is the second time that I have coloured in my Hinted Tarot outlines to form the basic of an actual deck. The first one, the Kitty Willows Tarot, was done in pale, delicate shades using water-colour pencil, with a back and border based on a humorous design of magic kittens growing on trees. But this second version has come out completely different. The colours are darker and richer, and the whole feel is moodier and more mysterious. Since the look and feel of the deck has changed so much, I decided it needed a new name in its new incarnation.

The Midnight Garden Tarot is loosely based on Rider-Waite-Smith, but I do try to avoid the sexism of many of the original images of the Minor Arcana in particular. My female characters tend to have a more active role than in RWS, and you will not find a blindfold anywhere in any of my decks.