DIABOLICAL is a set of two adult themed card decks: one a 78-card tarot deck, the other a 54-card poker deck, heavily influenced by imagery from both Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Inferno from the The Divine Comedy. The cards and their meanings are a template and each hand-drawn human figure reimagines the ancient tension between Heaven and Hell, extacy and torment, desire and despair. It’s both blasphemous and divinely celebratory. This project is meant for an adult audience and could be considered offensive to some. 

While the name “Diabolical” implies evil, wickedness, and all things delish— the card images merge and confuse “wickedness” with consensual pleasure and natural expressions of humanity. 

Each suit has a theme. Cups/Hearts: human blood and lust; Wands/Clubs: demonic fire, violence (to the self and others); Pentacles/Diamonds: greed and obsession with matierial posessions, earth-colored undead zombies; Swords/Spades: Haunted angels—some fallen, some not but all are a bit anxious and impulsive. 

These diffferent archetypes are simply reflections of our own human instincts. We are all capable of desiring power, of feeling anxiety, of expressing love and lust, of all consuming greed, or pure joy etc. We can live at extremes that alienate us from our community. 

Each deck is a functional artwork that doesn’t aim to model any ideal or aspiration. Instead it’s a reflection of who we are right now, hundreds of years after the poems that inspired this work were created. DIABOLICAL looks across the gap in time to see how little we’ve changed as humans. 

Each drawing is hand drawn on an iPad Pro in Procreate. It starts as a line drawing and becomes a digital painting for each card. 

The artwork for the tarot reflects the traditional suits of cups, wands, swords, pentacles while the poker deck replaces those images with with hearts, clubs, spades, and diamond respectivly. 

The tarot deck includes a major and minor arcana in the same format at the Rider-Waite-Smith Deck making it a seemless transition to read for experienced tarot readers. The tarot deck includes a guide in the box with meanings for each card and sample tarot spreads. 

The poker deck is a transformation deck which means the traditional card suits of hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs are illustrated into the images.

Shipping costs will be charged AFTER the project funds when you confirm your address. This time, I'm working with a fulfillment company to make it more efficient and less expensive for EU customers. 

Below are some finished cards for your viewing pleasure. They are currently in the poker deck format but Tarot cards on on the way!