Bonnie Cehovet: I have been using your Tarot Lovers Diary for several years now. (Easy to use, and I love it!) Amongst other things, you included in this diary a miniature version of the images in your deck, complete with backs! How very cool is that! The images could easily be cut out to make a lovely miniature deck to work with. How did this come about?
Karyn Easton: The mini deck was an idea that I had way back in 2000 when I first started playing about with early Tarot designs for my Tarot Lovers deck. It came about more by happy accident than by design. Each time I produced a new idea for a card and each time I designed a card in full I would reduce the image down really small to fit on an A4 sheet of paper. The reason for this was that I wanted to make sure that each card fitted in with the style of the deck. This was one of the hardest things to achieve throughout the deck design process. As an artist just because you draw something one way one day doesn’t necessarily mean your style will be the same the next. In order that my deck ‘hung’ together I needed to ensure that my drawing style was consistent as all of my cards are hand drawn from scratch. The best way to see how the cards were working together was to place each one side by side reduced right down in size to fit onto an A4 piece of paper. It was at this point that the idea of a mini deck happened. Self publishing a deck in the early ‘Noughties’, was a risky and expensive venture particularly if no-one liked your deck and no-one wanted to buy it. Crowd funding wasn’t really available back then so any artist wanting to self publish only had two options: either have a publisher taken on your deck or self publish which was extremely expensive a few years ago. When I looked at the small images on the A4 piece of paper it occurred to me that if people really liked the Tarot Lovers’ deck then they could cut out the small images and make them into a mini deck. The incorporation of the mini deck into the Tarot Lovers’ Diary meant that users could have both a functional diary, but also a mini working deck, at a fraction of the price of a single full-sized Tarot deck. So the Tarot Lovers’ Diary was born. You can find it here: http://www.paranormality.com/07diary.shtml