Brie Mine

Today I’m walking you through my process to create this collaged Valentine’s Day Card. This piece had me feeling pretty nostalgic and the process reminded me of my childhood when I would create handmade cards for my family or classmates.

Leaning into the nostalgia, I gathered inspiration from vintage valentine’s day cards from the 1950-60’s. I love the limited color palettes with the super vibrant reds and the sweet animals characters in vintage clothing.

I started out sketching the piece digitally:

Something I also love about Valentine's day cards is the shameless use of puns so I had to make it extra cheesy :D (see what I did there?). Once my design was nailed down, I created a color rough. The colors in my final piece ended up looking pretty different from the rough, but I find making color roughs provides jumping off point for when I needed to make those decisions while painting.

Next, I printed the design out traced the art onto a sheet of bristol board using a light board. I chose a pretty heavy weight paper so it would withstand the cut-out collage aspect of the project. I painted the cheese and strawberries on one sheet of paper and the mice and hearts on another sheet. After practicing using analog materials over the past year, I’ve found I really enjoy layering colored pencil details on top of textured areas of gouache and watercolor.

I had the most fun part painting the little mouse couple! I really leaned into the clothing style of the midcentury cards, especially in the lady mouse’s big striped poodle skirt.

Next, I painted a few pink and red blobs which I would use to make the hearts and cut out various shapes. I didn’t do much planning for this part and I just played around cutting out various heart shapes.

Once I glued the piece together, it was time to make the art into a greeting card. I scanned the collaged piece and brought it into photoshop. I played with the color values a bit and then removed the paper background in Photoshop. (I’ve mentioned this video tutorial before in a previous post, check it out if you want to learn how to remove backgrounds, I found it very helpful!)

Lastly, I added the lettering in procreate, made a tweaks and ta-da! A valentine’s day card!

Thanks for reading this month! I hope you all are having a lovely weekend with your love or practicing some self-love with a restful weekend <3 see you next time!