Mission: Creation Donation

All five gummy teams participated in this task.

The gummy bears had a whole bunch of blank cards left over from 1 Blank White Card, so they decided to make some tarot cards. Since they have mastered the art of You Change, gummies have no need for tarot cards. So they decided that would be the perfect thing to make for this task. They happen to know that Sparrows Fall is trained in the art of tarot card reading, so they figured they'd make a deck and give them to Sparrow.

What the gummies didn't realize is that a deck of tarot cards has 78 cards, and each card has a detailed and highly symbolic design. This would take them a very long time.* Still, the gummies are not the sort to sign up for a task and then abandon it unfinished, so they set about studying the relevant design aspects and creating the cards.

The gummies do not draw very well, so rather than draw each card, they decided to use props and costumes to act out the scene from each card. Evil Sugar then photographed each scene, and the photos (after being thoroughly cleaned up and processed in Photoshop) were printed and turned into actual physical cards.

The Minor Arcana



Each suit (swords, wands, cups, and pentacles) was assigned a different background color, using this site as a reference. The gummies used toothpick swords as swords, regular toothpicks as wands, laser pointer tips as cups, and pennies as pentacles.

Of the four suits, the cups were the trickiest to make:

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Each suit has fourteen cards, 10 numbered cards (ace through ten) and 4 court cards:



The court cards (for all 4 suits) have blue-gray backgrounds. The bears for each suit correspond to the background color for the numbered cards (e.g., Ace-10 of swords were on a yellow background, so the Yellow Team were the royalty for the court cards).

The Major Arcana

In addition to the 4 suits, there are also 22 "trumps" in a tarot deck. To make sure the cards had lots of good divination-y symbols on them, the gummies used this site as a reference. They used a wide range of props and staging techniques to create the cards.

Making the Magician

As an example of how the cards were made, let's take a look at the magician:



Note the similarities between the cards. Both have a yellow background. Both depict the magician, holding a wand, with the infinity symbol above the magician's head. Both have a table with the objects from the 4 suits (sword, wand, cup, and pentacle). To achieve this effect, the card was laid out in 3D:

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A guide was placed in front of the scene, so that the photographic image for the card could be cropped appropriately.

Props and Costumes

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The following items were used as props for this task: three kinds of toothpick, pennies, laser pointer tips, index cards, several shades of colored paper, gummy worms, gummy dinosaurs, kleenex, industrial staples (for prisoner bears), and one silver necklace. All items were stolen from the supply cabinets of the Evil Human Overlord.

A Few Favorites

The full deck is available in the photos section of the praxis, but the gummies wanted to share a few of their favorites here in the text.

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The Tower card seemed especially appropriate for a gummy tarot deck designed as part of an SF0 task.

The Physical Deck

Obviously, designing a bunch of digital images of the cards was not enough -- the task clearly says to build or make something. So far, all the gummies had done is design something. They uploaded all the images to a photo printing service, and 4-8 days later printed copies of the tarot cards arrived.

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At this point, the gummies were feeling quite pleased with themselves. The cards looked nice, and the gummies on the cards were life sized:

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The next step was to design the backs of the cards. Part of the point of this task, remember, was to get rid of some of the blank white cards that the gummies hadn't used. The gummies needed to come up with some artwork, and they decided that the best thing would be if the back of the cards had a picture of a bear on it. (Gummies like pictures of bears.) This was appropriate since, after all, the deck was a gummy bear tarot deck.

They loaded blank cards into the printer...

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And created 78 copies of their design.

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Now they had to trim the backs of the cards down to size and attach them to the fronts of the cards. They decided that the best way to do this would be to use magic.

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Unfortunately, the Magician was unable to do the necessary magic.**

No one was sadder about this lack of magic than Evil Sugar, who was left with the task of trimming backs and gluing them to the cards. (Several bears had recently died after ingesting glue, and the gummies were unwilling to work with such a toxic substance again. Evil Sugar suggested that they could work with the glue without eating it, but the bears insisted that this was not possible.)

Even without gummy assistance, Evil Sugar was able to finish the deck:

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The creation phase was complete. The cards were now ready for donation. The gummies decided to give Sparrow the cards as the final ending to "Leave Clues":

She found them:

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UPDATE:

The gummies were pleased to discover that Rainy is very small! So they made Rainy a teensy tiny gummy tarot deck:

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And wrapped the box with a little bow:

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* NOTE: Gummies experience time very differently from humans. Therefore a week of 'human time' is approximately equivalent to a decade of gummy time. The gummies spent 42 gummy years on this task.

** NOTE: This is understandable, since the red gummy bear that played the Magician is an actor*** not an actual magician.

*** NOTE: Those of you familiar with "Fun With Food" may recall that gummies are not good actors. However, the roles for the cards were all non-speaking parts, and therefore not susceptible to the annoying avantLOL style of the gummy actors.