The Making of the Deck
About the Author
The creator of The Iron Junction Tarot is an artist and long-time underworld cartographer with 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.
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 78-card tarot and this guidebook.
The deck in your hands is a set of maps, images, and language for people who find themselves in life’s hostile 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.
How this deck was made
Iron Junction Tarot did not begin as a neat product plan. It began as a pile of large canvases on a drop cloth on the floor of a rented room.
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.
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 an underworld journey, forged in the difficult terrain that myth calls the hours between four and five of the night. The writing of this guidebook came last, distilling lived experience, paintings, and underworld 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. 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, 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. 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 to help achieve the exact look required.
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.
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” 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 of darkness, 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, and the outcome is not guaranteed. It is not punishment. It is a forge.
The deck also carries echoes of other descent narratives and wandering epics: Dante’s Inferno, The Odyssey, and even 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 difficulty as real, takes the underworld seriously, and still insists that there is a part of you that does not have to surrender to it.
Imagery and Figures
The figures in this deck are deliberately faceless and covered: hoods up, gloves on, no visible skin. They are race‑neutral, gender‑ambiguous, 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, stations 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 in place of traditional symbols as a gentle nod to the author’s indigenous roots.
Materials and Accessibility
This deck is also built with accessibility in mind. The creator has spent most of her life priced out of “luxury” spiritual tools and did not want to recreate that barrier for others. For that reason:
The cards are printed on solid, readable cardstock—but not on ultra‑expensive collector stock that would double the price.
The box is functional and durable, not an elaborate art object that only a few can afford.
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, and someone working a low‑wage job can save up for without needing to skip rent.
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.
About the Cover
The cover image of Iron Junction Tarot is not decorative. It is the whole deck in one scene.
It began as 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 corridor itself, beautiful, hostile, and inescapable.
For the deck, that painting became a doorway.
The final cover shows a single hooded traveler standing at the mouth of that valley, staff in hand, backpack 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 mountains represent conditions that do not move for you: systems, people, debts, illnesses, institutions, grief and chains of events that are much larger than your personal will. They are sharp, cold, and indifferent. You don’t negotiate with them; you navigate between them.
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 here is not a soft guiding light. It’s 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, think of it less like flipping through definitions and more like walking through rooms.
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, what they are.
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.
