Printable Tarot Cards

When I set up Rider Waite Tarot Cards, I looked all over for some Rider Waite cards that could be easily downloaded and printed. I think when you’re first setting out on your Tarot journey, it’s important to start out with at least some idea of whether the deck you’re going to use is going to be one you’re comfortable with.

Unfortunately a lot of the printable Tarot cards available online, just weren’t really all that suitable for printing. Images on a computer aren’t always the best images for printing. In order to get them to display properly in a web browser they are set up very differently to how they would be set up on an actual, real life, piece of paper. Although I don’t know all the technical aspects of web images I do know that none of the images I found, that said they were ‘printable Tarot card images‘, actually looked any good when they were printed out.

Of course a lot will depend on the quality of your printer, but for the most part, it comes down to the actual images themselves.

And as the Rider Waite deck is obviously copyrighted, then finding images that meet all the requirements for you to be able to download a full deck, and print them off for your own use is a pretty difficult task.

Many of the available tarot cards to print are so small that once you  resize them, the images become distorted and so using them for a Tarot reading is next to impossible.

For those of you who have downloaded my free book ” A Fool’s Journey – A Simple Guide to The Tarot“, you will know that the printable images accompanying the book, are in fact named the ‘Colman Smith’ deck. And this is precisely because the name ‘Waite’ is copyrighted when used in conjunction with the Tarot.

It’s very important that when you are searching for a set of printable Tarot cards, that you check out whether the images are in fact suitable for printing. Don’t be tempted to simply download images that you see displayed on a website, no matter how good they may look. Once you download them to your computer, resize them to a useable size, and print them on to card, you will find that much of the visual impact is lost.

As Tarot relies heavily on the symbolism associated with the images, any loss of quality when you print out your cards will inevitably have an impact on the quality of your readings.

Follow these few simple steps when printing out Tarot cards you find online.

• Make sure the images are already of the right size. If you have to increase the size of the images before printing, then you will suffer a loss of quality.
• Print your cards onto good quality paper or card. Using a cheaper version may cause the ink to run or colours to bleed into each other.
• Make sure your printing options are set correctly, for the paper/card you are using.
• Laminate your cards once you have printed them. This helps not only to preserve your images but also makes them ‘feel‘ more like a real Tarot deck.

And if you do find any Rider Waite printable Tarot decks then please let me know so I can share them with my readers.