Quick General Info:

• Loaf Tarot Zine is a tarot deck of round loafly animals!
• Loaf Tarot will be a full deck of 78 major and minor cards at minimum.
• Depending on volume of interest and applicants, we may add 13 horoscope cards as well.
• Original art only! No fanart will be printed in the deck.
• We are looking for animal art, not human or antho.
• Most animals need to be critters currently living on Earth. A small number of prehistoric, extinct,  and fantasy animals may also be considered.
• Your portfolio should be 10 -15 images, preferably 50% of it should be animal art, round cute animal art is a plus.
• You must be 18+ by April 7 in order to apply and sign the contributor contract if accepted.
• We will have 10 or more guest artists showcased during applications.
• Communication will be through email and discord. Discord is not absolutely required but it would be a good help if you joined. c:
• This zine is for profit (or you may think of the charity as paying artists.)
• This zine will be kickstarted.
• The kickstarter minimum goal will be to fund the printing and shipping of the project. Further kickstarter profits will go towards stretch goals and paying artists.
• Artists will receive the option of one or maybe more free deck(s), cost of shipping for the free deck(s) depends on the kickstarter.
• Artists will be able to buy additional copies of the deck at a wholesale rate for the shops and in person events.

Please continue reading for further info on all these items.

Being that this is a tarot deck, it must have *all artists* to survive. We can’t drop a card from the deck because an artist ghosted. So get ready for us to be vigilant task managers. There’s definitely room for deadline forgiveness in this schedule, please come talk to us if you’re running late. The thing that is very bad bad is a total ghosting. If you miss a check in and say nothing at all about it and we can’t get a contact from you, we will drop you within a week and chase down a new artist. Because we have to have every artist accounted for.

• 2.75 x 4.75 inch standard tarot card size
• Deck comes in a tuck box.
• 78 Cards at Minimum!
• Cards will be UV coated cardstock.
• Back of cards and box will have holographic silver foil (silver foil with a rainbow sheen.)
• Major Arcana will not have any color specifications.
• Horoscope cards will not have color specifications, if the horoscopes are added.
• Minor Arcana WILL have a color assigned to each card so that when the cards are all printed, they will fan out to be a rainbow. The art doesn’t have to be *all* that color, but the color must be present, as prevalently as you’re able to do. 

Additional 13 horoscope cards will be added if there is enough artist interest in the deck. We are looking for a group of artists that all look good and work well together in a deck. 

The difficulty with adding 13 more artists will be further splitting the payment at the end between more people, without really adding to the value of the deck all that much. 

What would add to the value of the deck and make 13 more artists worth it? If those 13 artists are just that good that we can’t pass them up. Which could definitely happen!

 10 - 15 image portfolio (or more images if you think they would help, you won’t be disqualified for sending 20 images.)

Please gather the images in a folder some kind of way? Google drive works, also deviantart, art station, anything like that. Make a collection you can link to in your Shopify? We’re just looking for a folder of art. Portfolio websites work too, please link us to a folder on the site that best fits what Loaf Tarot is looking for. 

What doesn’t work is an ENTIIIIIRE twitter or an ENTIIIIIRE instagram. If you’re an artist doing multiple things and multiple styles, we really need to see direction from you of what you plan to create.

Please make your portfolio at least 50% animal art. You are allowed to include human and fanart and anthro art if they’re some of your best pieces, but we really want to see animals.

Round cute animal art portfolio is desired. We’ll look at your hunting velociraptor also though.

Round loaf animal!

Make it round! Make it cute! If it’s a 20 foot python you better find a way.

Any creature in the animal kingdom will be considered. We do hope to see aps for a big variety of animals! Insects, fish, birds, all of it. C: whatever you feel inspired to make round and cute.

Some fantasy animals and some extinct animals may also appear. But please don’t apply strictly for those. If you want to draw a unicorn, do put that on your ap, but also consider how you can branch that into a few different things you like. For instance you might write a few different ideas, like “unicorn, pegasus, qirin, horse, palomino horse, black stallion horse, pony” if you like all those things and would want to draw any of them. 

We know some animals are very popular. Foxes, for instance. Maybe there will be three different artists doing foxes. We want to spread you out on to different sorts of foxes to make sure all the foxes are different. You might receive a specific assignment like ‘white kitsune with multiple tails’ or ‘red fox’ or ‘fennec fox.’

You might ask yourself what sorts of animals you like that everyone else likes … and what sorts of animals do you like that you think very few people would ask for. Try to apply for a range of things. What matters most is your portfolio, but if ten fantastic artists apply for ‘cat’ it would make it easiest for us to sort you on to different types of cats if you can include additional interests or specific types of cats on the ap. 

We are looking for a range of styles. Fantasy painting, comic, cartoon, anime, all are desired. 

The art does have to be in color. Vibrant color would be best.

All mediums will be considered. 

Cards do not have to exactly represent their tarot meaning. So like the 10 of Swords won’t have 10 swords on it. The Tower may be lacking in destruction or maybe it will be very darling cute destruction. 

Cards may have more than one animal on it. They don’t all have to be the animal you applied for. If you applied to draw a cow and you want to draw it in a barn with chickens that’s fine. 

Card art cannot have people in it. Just animals. (People in your portfolio is ok.)

The card art must have a background. It doesn’t have to be an immense background. Or it can be really background heavy! Whatever you’re up for.

There will be at least 10 guest artists who debut during the application period! It will be helpful to the project because it will both help spread the word when the guest artist posts about Loaf Tarot and also the guest art samples will give some idea of what art will definitely be in the deck.

Guest artists receive no special treatment other than just being accepted to the project early and having their art used as credited sample material.

When you are approved to join the project, you will have to sign a contract.
Please be 18 or more years of age by April 7th in order to sign legally for yourself. 

Artists will retain all rights to their work. You can do anything you want with it, print anything, include it in a future tarot deck or art book or calendar. 

We would prefer if you could hold off on printing your Loaf Tarot art for other projects until after our Kickstarter has concluded, but we also don’t want you to miss out on opportunities because you’re waiting on Loaf Tarot. So if you’re able to wait on printing it, please wait! But if you think you’d be really helped by hurrying up and adding it to your shop, or if you have an art book or a calendar or your own tarot deck you want to include it in and you have to do it while this zine is still going, that’s ok, you can go ahead. No rights holding of ours is worth damaging anyone over. 

The organizers of this deck are located in the US.  International artists may apply but you must be able to accept payment in USD. 

Please note, it's cheap to provide free tarot decks to contributing artists, but we may not be able to cover shipping for international artists (it very much depends on the kickstarter funding.) The minimum print run for this project is 500 decks, so it's cheap (and possibly even necessary) to make a bunch of free decks! International shipping can be 3 or 4 or 5 times the cost of printing that free deck though. If the kickstarter makes a bunch of money, there's money to ship decks! If it doesn't, contributors may have to pitch in for shipping. What we've done in the past is average the cost of shipping out among all artists and then contributors get to decide if they want money or decks. More on this payment situation further down...

Artists will be paid through paypal.

The Kickstarter for this project will launch Sept 8 and run until Oct 8. 

That puts us receiving printed decks in November. 

It’s a bit of a tight fit but we want to mail out kickstarter and backerkit orders in time for Christmas 2021. 

The kickstarter goal will be the minimum needed to print and ship the deck. 

We will have stretch goals (probably enamel pins and other merch) to help incentivize people to continue backing the project even after full funding. 

Our reason for guaranteeing no artist payment until kickstarter over funding is that we have been a part of other kickstarter projects that have NOT reached funding because they had a goal of 30,000 or more dollars in an effort to insure artists a good pay rate. It is our feeling that we would rather see a project get made than never ever printed for lack of artist compensation. We have been artists in that situation, feeling that we just want to see the thing get made. We realize this may not be a popular idea. We’re sorry that we can’t guarantee artist pay until the Kickstarter funding goal for printing and shipping is met. 

We organizers will also not be guaranteed pay for this project. If there is a profit, we will be paid 10% of profits (not 10% of gross) for our efforts. If there is no profit, we made a cool thing yay!

Artists will be able to order extra decks at a wholesale rate to sell themselves.  The wholesale rate will cover paying all artists a small portion.  If in person events resume, we will be selling extra decks in person. You must be okay with other people selling decks if you decide to participate. 

Part of our reason for needing this minimum funding goal is that the years of 2020 and probably also 2021 are difficult years. (I am writing this is Feb 2021, having no idea what catastrophes lie in wait between me and September 2021.) Right now I think there are a LOT of kickstarter projects going because people are desperate. Because there are so many projects, funding is rough. Also, we bunch of regular humans living through this hard time are pretty well out of money for surviving. Not everyone is going to be able to pull out 35$ for a tarot deck right now. 2020 also saw many shipping related disasters, such as long delays on mail traveling over an ocean and long waits at ports. 

We don’t know what September 2021 is gonna look like, but we want to prep everyone that we don’t know. Will people be back to work or still not? Will shipping over oceans need to be limited because of horrible delays? Will Covid be decimated by a vaccine? Will Covid be out of control due to new strains of the virus being immune to vaccines? WHO KNOWS. 

We live in the United States and will be importing this deck from China.

We will at least be able to provide Kickstarter shipping to the US and Canada. 

We just want to put it out there, that these are the difficulties facing this and any project, and we organizers want to prep you to limit your expectations and be ready for us to edit plans to react to whatever situation is happening in September. This is why we’re not going to bet it all or nothing on a big 30,000$ or more kickstarter. We’re hoping for a 7,000 - 10,000$ minimum goal to just print and ship, and that honestly seems doable. We might even fund beyond that! We think Kickstarter audiences are always excited for stretch goals to unlock too! So we’ll be planning a few of those to hopefully fund over the bare minimum and get everyone paid something.

We’ve run one tarot deck before, it was called Fate Fatale. We want to talk a little about how that project went and use it as an example of how free decks and payments might turn out for Loaf Tarot.

The minimum order for printing a pretty tarot deck like this is 500! The cost per unit gets better if we print 1000 decks! (or even more!) The printing is offset print, and there will be the pretty die cut foil stamp on the back of each card and the box. 

So, gotta order 500 decks at minimum. 

Best Case Scenario, there’s plenty of funding and everything is great and awesome and every artist gets lots of money and free decks! Yay! This best case scenario is pretty uncertain, for all the reasons just listed a few paragraphs ago. So let’s talk about the Medium Case Scenario…

Medium Case Scenario, we reach the funding goal, and few thousand extra. At this point we probably have decks left over (because we had to print 500 or 1000 of them) but we have limited money for shipping decks to artists. What we did with Fate Fatale was offer artists no free decks and get the max amount of money, one free deck and get slightly less money, or 6 free decks and get slightly less less money. The goal being if you want the 6 free decks, you can sell them at shows or online in your shop and earn even more than what we’d have paid you. 

We *also* offered artists as many decks as they desired to buy at 15$ each + shipping (about double the printing cost.) There are a lot of benefits to doing this! It helps raise the number of decks we print and lower the cost of each unit. It provides additional funding that is split between all contributors. It helps the artists who buy extra decks because they spend 15$ and can then sell the decks for 35 or 45$. We *want* artists to buy wholesale decks. Please consider it if you run a shop or vend at shows.

* We may not be able to ship to Russia or China. This has been a past struggle. Artists in these countries can definitely apply! But you might only get money for your effort. 

** Full disclosure: We organizers bought hundreds of decks of Fate Fatale. We have bought hundreds of copies of other zines we’ve been participants in. This is uuuuh. Definitely a financial risk on occasion. Will it sell? Will it not? Will I ever have shows to sell this project at ever again? The thing zine projects need most is to sell copies. We both are passionate about self publishing and small publishing. To whatever extent we’re able, we try to fund the things we’re a part of. We are creating Loaf Tarot because we want to make a pretty thing! We also think it will be popular on Etsy and in person. All the decks we sell online and in person we will be buying wholesale from Loaf Tarot. We hope other artists will join us in selling this project online and in person. C:

Once the kickstarter is done, we will probably also run a backerkit shop. All the kickstarter and the backerkit and the wholesale deck profits will be split evenly among all contributing card artists. At the close of the kickstarter, we will calculate up how many decks we need to fulfill orders along with some extra copies, and that will be the first printing of the deck!

Decks will not be printed indefinitely. 

There is the potential of doing a second print run. We wouldn’t do another kickstarter for it. It would be mainly if enough artists want to buy more wholesale copies. The contract at the beginning of this project is for only one print run in whatever quantity is decided upon at the end of the kickstarter. So for a second print run we would need to sign another contract and the payment would probably be royalties from a bunch of wholesale decks. We *did* do a second print run for Fate Fatale. But it really isn’t ideal to do two separate runs, it would be much better to over order for one big print run.

You don’t personally have to buy wholesale decks, or want to be partly paid in free decks. You just have to be ok with your art being in the deck and others will buy and distribute the project you’re in. 

Fate Fatale paid artists around 100 - 150$ ish per card (depending on a lot of factors.) But Loaf Tarot and Fate Fatale are so different, and existing at very different times, it’s impossible to guess how Loaf Tarot will do. 

We will be wanting a few things to go with the tarot deck on kickstarter!

You can apply for both card artist and merch artist positions and be considered separately for each. 

Some merch will be tiers that people can buy from the beginning.

Some merch will be stretch goals that may or may not be met. 

We will be wanting small items that fit in a small box with a tarot deck! Enamel pins, lanyards washi tape, and memo pads come to mind. 

Some of this merch deciding will happen when we look at ap portfolios. If someone applies with mind blowing acrylic keychains, well that’s it then, maybe they’ll design one for us.

Merch artists will be paid 50% of what a card artist is paid, with payment being capped at 50$ per design. The reason for this is merch is frequently less complex than card art. 

Payment for merch designs is again reliant on what the Kickstarter funding is, and also dependent on how complex the merch is. For instance, if you design one enamel pin, and card artists are being paid 50$, you might be paid 25$ for your pin and receive some free copies of it if we have extra pins.

All of this money stuff, in summary, comes down to there being at least 78 artists, maybe more like 90 - 100 artists, and funding is uncertain in an uncertain world. 

If you wanna make a cool thing please apply!

If money is primarily the issue then a zine with dozens and dozens of artists is probably not going to fulfil the dream.

We realize the unknown money situation is difficult. It's tempting to think that maybe waiting to do this project until the world is better at all would maybe give a better funding result. 

What we *DO* have right now is TIME. A whole other type of a wealth. 

We are making the decision to go through the interest check and aps, and just see if there's enough desire for the project for us to proceed. The world is a disaster, money is bad bad always, but we two organizers have *time* right now to create this project. We hope you'll consider joining us. c:

Thank you for reading this monstrously long thing. :D

Cari and Amanda