1. Card of creation: The beginning of Gu.

Mawu and Lisa are said to be married conjoined twins and are the perfect complementary pair. Mawu is the female goddess of the moon that symbolises passion, gentleness, forgiveness, motherhood and fertility. All characteristics that one perceives as feminine. Lisa is the male god of the sun and is connected with the day, heat, power, strength and toughness. All typical qualities that are seen as masculine. Mawu-Lisa also known as the moon and sun deities created Gu; a divine tool of the gods, in the form of a mighty sword.
Gu was known as the heavenly blacksmith and the inventor of all iron crafts. Mawu-Lisa sent Gu to Earth to do odd jobs and to teach humanity how to craft with iron. Gu filled unsightly craters, fixed leaky oceans and taught humanity how to blacksmith and create their tools to make Earth more habitable. The humans were very grateful and he was soon promoted to God of Smiths, Weapons and War.
For the first card, I wanted to show the creation of Gu. As Gu was created in the cosmos, I decided the background to be the galaxy with stars and a milky way. I aspired to unite multiple tarot cards into one card to tell this portion of the story.
I selected the sun, moon and ace of sword tarot cards for the Gu creation card. The first basis for this arrangement is that each card depicts a character on my card. The moon represents Mawu, the sun represents Lisa and the ace of the sword card represents Gu. The second reason for this is the fertility symbolism of these cards, those three cards shown together can often mean fertility in tarot reading. I also had symbolism with the colour schemes I chose for my cards. I wanted the background to be bright and joyful as birth is something to be celebrated.
For the core focus of the card, I wanted Mawu to have calming whites and cool blues to symbolise the evening and for Lisa to have energetic yellows and fierce reds to symbolise the heated day. For Gu colours, I decided to go with both cool and warm metal colours to symbolise the connection that both Mawu and Lisa have to him as their son. Character design also played a part when creating my tarot cards. I painted the Mawu character with round shapes to represent the moon and softness to show femininity. For Lisa's character design, I painted him with hard and pointy edges to represent the flames of the sun and an aggressive pose to show his masculinity.