The Making of the Deck
About the Author
The creator of The Iron Junction Tarot is an artist and long-time underworld cartographer with European and Métis Cree Indigenous roots. For over a decade, she has supported herself doing working class jobs while building paintings, stories, and tarot systems in the margins of some very hard and brutal years.
A hand painted tarot deck from the underworld ledger.Some paintings are landscapes. This one is more like an autopsy of a house, not a literal house, exactly, though sometimes it feels literal. More like the place under the place. The room beneath the room. The ancestral basement where grief, poverty, madness, humiliation, silence, and survival were all stored in the walls because nobody had anywhere else to put them.Iron Junction Tarot began there.Canvas first. Then card. Then room.Then station.
This deck was painted and written slowly, one card at a time, during a prolonged passage through hostile terrain emotionally, spiritually, and practically. The art began as solitary canvases: mountains, corridors, thresholds, strange moonlit rooms before being distilled into a complete 80 card tarot and guidebook.
The deck in your hands is a set of maps, images, and language for people who find themselves in life’s corridors. The hard won lessons gained by the author in those corridors have been folded into these cards so you can carry a map instead of walking blind.
Iron Junction Tarot is built from original canvas paintings, family hauntings, underworld weather, and the long work of surviving what was handed down and must finally be accounted for and laid to rest.
How this deck was made
Iron Junction Tarot did not begin as a neat product plan. It began as a pile of large canvases and sketch books on a drop cloth on the floors of a rented rooms.
For years, the art came first. Painted without a studio, often without even an easel, the images arrived as solitary landscapes and rooms: narrow mountain corridors, underworld valleys, strange doors, empty platforms, figures walking alone under a watching moon. Most of these pieces were made on the floor, with whatever supplies were affordable at the time, in the gaps between long workdays cleaning houses.
Only later did they begin to organize themselves into a tarot.
The deck that became Iron Junction is a mixed media project. The original paintings were photographed and reworked using a combination of basic Photoshop tools, sketching, and carefully directed AI image assistance. Much of that digital labor was done on a barely functioning old phone and a cheap laptop that crashed often. This was not a glossy, well funded studio process. It was a slow, stubborn one: paint, photograph, edit, crash, try again.
Over roughly a decade, the images slowly aligned with a tarot structure. Each card became a “room” or scene in the author’s journey, forged in the difficult terrain that Egyptian myth calls the hours between four and five of the night of Ra’s journey. The writing of this guidebook came last, distilling lived experience, paintings, and lore into language that could travel.
This deck is the result of all of that: floor painted canvases, glitchy hardware, improvised tools, and a long, unwilling apprenticeship in hostile corridors, shaped, refined, and finally gathered into seventy-nine cards you can hold in your hands.
A note on tools and AI
Most tarot decks today are made by teams. One person has the concept, another illustrates, another writes the guidebook, another handles design and pre-press, and someone else manages marketing and logistics, website design, video editing and production. That’s a valid way to work, but it wasn’t an option here.
This deck was made without a studio, without a budget, and without a team of human assistants.
The tools available were canvases, pencils, sketch pads, cheap brushes, a drop cloth on the floor, a glitchy laptop, an old phone, basic Photoshop, and eventually some AI-assisted image and text tools.
Every single card in Iron Junction is rooted in one of the author’s own original canvas paintings, sketches and two photographs. The AI tools did not “generate a tarot deck” on their own. Each image was hand directed: mood, symbolism, composition, and atmosphere were all specified by the author, built from her paintings, and revised until they matched the scenes in her head. Where AI tools couldn’t quite reach what was needed, she took the work into Photoshop and, in a few cases, hired a freelance editor from Bangladesh to help correct card issues I was unable to fix myself such as card formatting size to fit print templates.
In other words: nothing here is a random prompt result. The machines were used like brushes, lenses, and assistants, not like oracles.
AI in this project functioned the way a small studio staff might for someone with more resources: helping refine compositions, adjust lighting and texture, test alternate versions of images, catch typos, and tighten sentences. Every card is still rooted in the original paintings and in lived experience. The machines did not decide what this deck is about. They helped carry it.
Not all creators come from a place where they can rent a studio, hire an illustrator, or pay a designer. Iron Junction was built with whatever was at hand: paint, time stolen from long shifts, and the weird, imperfect tools of this era. This section exists so you know that plainly, and so other makers who are working on the floor with limited means know they are not alone. This deck was extremely personal to me so I maintained full levels of authorship at each step of the process and I was extremely pedantic about the deck staying to to my vision and experience. AI was a tool I used to refine the deck, not to create the deck.
About the Soul of the Deck
Iron junction sits at the crossroads of a few old mythologies and one very modern life.
On one side is a thread from Sethian Gnosticism: the idea of an “immovable race” current of spirit that does not belong to hostile powers and cannot be fully absorbed by them. In that view, there is something in you that does not consent to the arrangements of this world, no matter how thoroughly your circumstances try to claim you. It can be battered, exhausted, and cornered, but not owned.
On the other side is an Egyptian image: the nightly journey of Ra through the Duat, the underworld. Each night the sun barque travels through twelve hours, facing gates, monsters, and hostile waters on its way to rise again. The hours around four and five are among the most difficult: the deepest part of the night, when structures fail, enemies close in, it id a forge and the outcome is not guaranteed.
The deck also carries echoes of other descent narratives and wandering epics: Dante’s Inferno, and The Odyssey
I didn’t read Dante or The Odyssey to feel literary ( ok maybe a little) I read them because I was desperate for anything that made sense of what my life felt like.
When I read Inferno, I understood it immediately. Not as theology, but as a map. That opening image of Dante on the hill, seeing the normal world on the other side and realizing he still has to go down through hell first, that’s what my life has felt like.
I have desperately wanted a simple, quiet, aboveground life where people have safe homes and steady routines, I wanted that more than anything. Instead, I kept being pushed into the underworld, into other people’s violence, obsessions, addiction, cruelty, and the systems that protect them.
Reading Dante, I didn’t see “punishment for sinners.” I saw a person who had to walk through every circle, watch what brought people there, and keep moving even when he wanted to turn back. That is exactly how my years have felt: like being forced to witness the machinery of hell from the inside, taking notes and creating art so I don’t lose myself.
It was the same with The Odyssey. People talk about the gods “taking a special interest” in Odysseus like it’s an honor. It never read that way to me. It read like what happens when a life gets dragged into one ordeal after another while all he actually wants is to go home.
That’s the part that clicked for me, the fact that Odysseus is not looking for adventure. He’s not chasing glory. He just wants a small, ordinary home life and keeps getting rerouted through storms, monsters, and cursed islands. I’ve felt that for years. I don’t want drama. I want a safe room, a steady roof, and to be left alone. Instead, I kept getting pulled into “episodes” I never asked for.
Those two books made me feel less alone. They told me: you’re not the first person to be dragged through hell when all you wanted was a quiet life. Also The NeverEnding Story, which became an early imaginative landscape for the author as a child. Stories of underworld passage, impossible journeys, hostile terrain, and the stubborn refusal to stop moving forward all helped shape the atmosphere of this deck.
This deck was born in that kind of terrain. The cards are built as “rooms” or scenes along an underworld corridor: narrow passes, junctions, small mercies, ambushes, thresholds, and strange platforms where you have to decide whether to board or stay. They are not here to promise that everything will be fine. They are here to show you where you are, what kind of forces are moving around you, and how to keep your spirit from being pulled out of shape and completely distorted.
At the same time, Iron Junction is not meant only for people who have lived through catastrophic years. You do not need a matching biography to use this deck. It is for anyone who wants a tarot that treats takes your journey seriously, and will accompany you as would a trusted friend.
Imagery and Figures
The figures in this deck are deliberately faceless and covered: hoods up, gloves on, no visible skin. They are race neutral and specific to no single culture. This is on purpose. Iron Junction Tarot is not tied to one ethnicity, body, or background. Anyone can step into these scenes and see themselves as the traveler, the watcher, the worker on the platform, or the person standing at the edge of a difficult choice.
The landscapes are likewise myth mixed: mountains that could belong to many continents, scenes that feel half modern, half ancient, corridors that echo both the Duat and other underworlds. The intention is not historical reconstruction; it is recognizability. If you have ever felt like you were walking alone through hostile territory with something important trying to stay intact inside you, you already know this terrain.
The uses the elements of Earth, Air, Fire, water as symbols in a gentle nod to the author’s indigenous roots.
Materials and Accessibility
This deck is also built with accessibility in mind. The focus was on quality of the deck rather than fancy packaging, because printing costs are prohibitive and expensive, the budget was largely spent on card quality and book printing and accessibility.
The cards are printed on solid, readable cardstock, but not on ultra‑expensive collector stock that would double the price.
The cards are shrink wrapped to minimize excess.
The guidebook is available both as a printed volume for those who love physical books and as an e‑book edition to keep costs down for readers on a tighter budget.
Iron Junction is designed to be a deck you can actually use: something a well worn collector can add to their shelf, a traveler can throw into a backpack, someone working a low wage job can save up for without skipping rent, or someone at a luxury spa, everyone’s journey has trials. The deck is for everyone.
This deck belongs to anyone who recognizes themselves in its corridors—whether you come to it as a survivor, a student of myth, a tarot reader looking for a map, or simply someone who likes atmospheric cards with their hoods up.
The deck’s underlying foundation.
The underlying foundation of Iron Junction is a haunted house.
Every card is a room, a corridor, a stairwell, a locked door, a window, a basement, or a threshold inside the same vast structure. Some rooms are obvious the moment you enter them. Grief. Betrayal. Exile. Refusal. Survival. Others reveal themselves more slowly: the room where someone realizes they have stayed too long, the hallway where the same pattern keeps repeating under different names, the chamber where an old debt continues to collect interest, the staircase that leads deeper even when you are trying to leave, rooms that feel like a prison in which fate itself feels like an inescapable compressing force. The deck treats these experiences not as isolated moods, but as places people enter and move through. Some are temporary. Some become prisons. Some contain something older that has been waiting long before you arrived.
Iron Junction is interested in the forces that do not move simply because you want them to. Systems, institutions, illnesses, grief, debt, power, family patterns, consequences, and chains of events larger than personal will. These forces can be sharp, cold, impersonal, and indifferent. They do not care whether you are ready. They do not negotiate. They have their own timing, their own weight, and their own architecture. The work of the deck is not to pretend that every obstacle can be overcome through optimism or desire. It is to help you see what kind of structure you are standing inside, what can be changed, what cannot, where the exits are, what the cost of staying may be, and what movement is still available to you.
Astrology appears throughout the deck as a system of tour guides and hosts for this journey. The planets are not decorative symbols added for atmosphere. They represent different forces operating within the house and different ways reality organizes pressure, timing, appetite, consequence, rupture, meaning, and movement. Saturn shows the walls, limits, debts, time, duty, ruin and structures that refuse to bend. Rahu leads into hunger, distortion, obsession, disruption, and the strange corridors where ordinary rules stop behaving normally. Mars shows force, courage, conflict, action, and the moment a decision has to be made. Jupiter interprets the larger meaning of the journey and asks what knowledge can be carried forward. Ketu cuts, severs, empties, and closes doors that can no longer remain open. Together, they act less like fortune tellers and more like staff assigned to different sections of the building.
Astrology matters here because it offers a language for the structure of fate and fortune. Not fate as a fixed script where nothing can change, and not fortune as a promise that everything will work out, but as the underlying mechanics of circumstance: timing, inheritance, pressure, repetition, opportunity, limitation, and consequence. It helps describe why certain doors open, why others remain locked, why some patterns return, why some events arrive with more force than personal intention can counter, and why certain periods of life feel like expansion while others feel like compression. It does not remove agency. It clarifies the terrain in which agency operates.
That is the architecture of Iron Junction. The cards are rooms. The planets are the guides. The house is the world beneath the visible world, where hidden systems, old patterns, power structures, memory, fate, grief, refusal, survival, and consequence continue moving through the walls. The deck does not promise that every room can be transformed into something pleasant, you learn to navigate instead of trying to move or negotiate with forces that are far stronger than you. It offers a map, a lantern, and a way to recognize where you are.
It began as the first painting, a large canvas painted on the floor of a rented room: a narrow mountain valley under a cold moon, steep walls closing in on both sides, a pale path running down the center like a river of light. There were no figures in the original painting, just the house corridor itself, beautiful, hostile, and inescapable.
For the deck, that painting became a doorway.
The cards show a single hooded traveler standing at the mouth of that valley, backpack and boots on, facing into the darkness. This is Stormwalker, but it can be anyone: the moment when an ordinary life slips sideways into a different kind of landscape and there is no going back the way you came.
The path is the narrow, uneven way through, It is the sequence of choices and non choices you make just to keep going. It’s not lit by a friendly sun. It’s lit by something stranger.
The moon and the house here are not a soft guiding light or a warm home. They are closer to an eye or a weighing lamp: bright, watchful, and a little merciless. It suggests surveillance, a bit of the feeling of being seen by forces that do not particularly care if you are comfortable. For better or worse, the journey must be taken and some passages will test everything you’re made of.
Think of the paintings like…
the world before the switch flips
And the tarot versions are:
the moment the current runs through it
When the paintings were turned into cards, the scenes became activated.
That’s why the originals feel quieter, more observational… and the cards feel like they’ve stepped forward and said, “okay, now this is happening.”
It gives deck two layers:
the dream state (paintings)
the event state (cards)
This deck wasn’t built by following a system step by step. It was lived. Each card comes from something real, it was an experience, a season, a place I stood in and had to move through. Some of those places were quiet. Some were heavy. Some I didn’t want to stay in very long at all. And some were the kind of places that can take something from you if you don’t know where you’re standing.
When you move through this deck Each card is a room.Some are open and easy to stand in. Some feel familiar right away. Others are strange, uncomfortable, or harder to understand at first. Some are beautiful in a way that lets you rest with warmth, connection, something soft that reminds you why any of this matters. Others are sharp, revealing, the kind that show you something you can’t unsee once you’ve stepped inside. Some rooms are haunting, and some are not safe.
There are rooms in here that hold hunger, illusion, power, control, loss, the things that can distort you if you stay too long or walk in without awareness. Some of them are seductive. Some of them are brutal. Some of them will offer you exactly what you think you want, and take something quieter in return.A few of them are, plainly …dark
The guidebook reflects that. Not every entry is the same length or tone, because not every experience is. Some rooms speak in long echoes. Some hit fast and leave a mark. Some are clear. Others unfold slowly, or don’t fully make sense until later.
That’s intentional. You’re not meant to treat every card the same way. You’re meant to enter it, feel it, recognize what it is and then decide how close you want to stand to it.
Some cards will feel like places you’ve already been. Some will feel like warnings. Some will feel like shelter.
Some will feel like something looking back at you. And some, like the Hall of Glass Promises, are rooms where it’s better to walk through slowly, with your eyes open and your hands at your sides. You don’t have to reach for everything you see. Not every door is meant to be opened.
Not every offering is meant to be accepted.
This deck isn’t asking you to memorize meanings. It’s asking you to recognize experiences, in yourself, in your past, or in what’s unfolding in front of you now.
Take your time with it and I wish you well on your journey Dear Wanderer, where ever your fate may take you, and I sincerely hope my deck can keep you company on your way.
