1. Painting technique
2. Style
3. My cards and their meanings
4. Short history of the deck
Technique: The original paintings are originally 12 * 16 cm big and are painted on thin, smooth sketch paper with high quality coloured pencil.
At no point did I use human models; I've always painted strictly out of my own head.
Style: The realistic style of my cards, coupled with some mystic elements, is owed to both my love of human faces and of telling stories. Also, it was one of my main concerns that the people depicted and their emotions look real. I've never liked decks in which everyone has to look beautiful and calm and thus meaningless, vacant. With my cards, if someone is angry, sad or happy, you'll see their face contort with this emotion, just like a real person's face does when they're feeling that way. You should be able to make a good guess at a card's meaning just by looking at the people depicted, without having to consult a book. Therefore, I also used very few symbols.
My cards and their meanings: The Anna.K Tarot Deck contains the 78 cards which are described in most available books. Depicting their meanings I partly kept quite close to the symbolism of the traditional depictions (e.g. The Tower), but where I wanted to highlight certain aspects of the cards' meanings more than the traditional depictions do (e.g. The Lovers, The World). Of course with these cards the descriptions of their meanings as given on the following pages also deviate a bit from the conventional ones.
It is important to accept that there are no “true” or “wrong” interpretations of the cards – so mine are also just meant as a support, as a starting point. Reading the cards means putting part of yourself, of your own history, into them. You too will soon begin to develop your own style and interpretations.
Short history of the Anna.K Tarot: I started making my own deck at the age of fourteen, because I was unsatisfied with the decks available then - they were either pretty but colour- and meaningsless or so overloaded with symbols that I got dizzy looking at them. After giving up the project and taking it up again several times I finally completed the full Set in 2004. (I re-designed at least half of the cards in the years that followed, though). After looking for a publisher without success but receiving a great number of inquiries from people all over the world where my deck could be purchased I finally decided to self-publish in December 2008. This first edition was sold out only a year later. At first I thought to just leave it at that but then so many people asked me when "the second edition" could be purchased. So I was finally persuaded to take the risk and self-publish again - the second edition was released in June 2010 and has been selling amazingly well so far.
In 2012 I was contacted by the US-American publisher Llewellyn about my deck. And since April 2013 there are now two versions of the Anna.K Tarot deck on the market: my own, limited edition, which I'm allowed to continue selling until I run out of stock, and the new, unlimited edition of Llewellyn! The latter differs from mine in the design of the cards' frames and titles, of the box and booklet, but the images themselves are the same.