Yoshi Yoshitani

Yoshi Yoshitani is a California based concept artist and illustrator whose client list includes Disney, DC Comics, Valiant, Image Comics, DreamWorks and Netflix, alongside video game work that included concept art for Bandai Namco's Ni No Kuni II. She has received an Eisner Award nomination, one of the comics industry's most recognized honors, for her illustration work. Her tarot deck, Tarot of the Divine, published by Clarkson Potter, a Random House imprint, reimagines the seventy eight cards of the Major and Minor Arcana through mythology and folklore drawn from cultures including China, Japan, Peru, Norway, Persia, England, Greece, Denmark and Maori tradition from New Zealand, with an accompanying guidebook explaining how each cultural story maps onto the card's traditional tarot meaning. That approach distinguishes the deck from the largely European occult and Renaissance imagery used in the Rider Waite Smith tradition and its many direct successors, instead building each card from a specific documented myth or folktale rather than a generalized symbolic archetype. Yoshitani's background in mainstream commercial illustration and video game concept art, rather than in tarot, astrology or New Age publishing specifically, places her among a newer generation of tarot deck creators who came to the format from broader commercial art careers rather than from spiritual teaching or divination practice.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Tarot of the Divine's structure, built from myths and folktales across a dozen cultures, grew out of a personal choice Yoshitani has described directly: connecting tarot's own archetypal structure to a mixed race, multicultural identity in deciding which cultures' stories the deck would draw from, rather than treating the cultural range as a neutral curatorial exercise. The breakthrough that unlocked the rest of the seventy eight card deck, by Yoshitani's own account, was illustrating the Little Mermaid as the Fool, the single card that showed how the whole structure could work.

That deck was not a one time project. Yoshitani went on to create a companion Handbook explaining the mythological sourcing card by card, and a further title, Beneath the Moon, extending the same illustrated card format into new material. The commercial client list built around Disney, DC Comics and Netflix work sits alongside comics illustration specifically, Zatanna and the House of Secrets and I Am Not Starfire, graphic novels that carried the same illustration career into serialized long form storytelling rather than single card images.

Both strands, the graphic novel work and Beneath the Moon, extend Yoshitani's career past the single deck that made the initial, career defining leap from commercial concept art and video game illustration into published divination cards, the identity driven curatorial choice behind Tarot of the Divine's cultural range remaining the throughline connecting a card deck, a handbook, a second oracle title and ongoing comics work under one illustration career.