‘Football Tarot Project’ has been scribbled repeatedly in my notebooks since about 2014. Every time I wrote it I felt a surge telling me this was a good idea, this had legs. Certain shortcomings in skill always stopped me taking the plunge, it just felt like I’d not execute it properly. In late 2021 I found myself drawn to the format again and made a small list of Major Arcana possibilities; Ronaldinho as The Magician, Adriano as The Emperor and Collina as Judgement.
I made a rough of the Collina artwork which you can see below. It’s very much based on the layout of an iconic judgement card but even in making this I gained some confidence. I rarely fill every corner of an image with colour and it felt good pushing past this limitation.
In January 2022, illustrator Jason Gomez got in touch after we chatted about his football tarot project. My Collina experiment gave me the confidence to take part after Jason kindly asked me. I got to work on Adriano as ‘The Emperor’ which was extremely appealing.
This execution represents my best work to date as it embodies a lot of small successes I've been chasing for the last ten years. Creating representational art of a subject using their mythology and not using any reference photos being a major goal.
The boxes are directly inspired by the work of Mike Mignola; he will put little floating square panels with mundane details of a scene to build up a mood. I decided to mirror this to reference beats of Adriano's life story.
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