Valentine’s Day is almost here, and today I’ve got a card tutorial for you that’s almost too pretty to send. It’s such a simple concept that you could make several of these beauties! Ready to start twisting?
A couple of months ago, I created a twist-out card tutorial for Christmas (you can see it here). Recently, a TPK reader emailed with a great idea: make a similar tutorial, but for Valentine’s Day! Today, I ran with that, and I love the results. If you’ve got some free time before Valentine’s Day, I highly recommend creating a card like this one!
You’ll need a few basic tools in order to create this tutorial. Feel free to swap out supplies if you don’t have the exact same ones at home!
Use your white mechanical pencil and your ruler to make a vertical guideline in the middle of the card. Then, draw two horizontal guidelines. One horizontal guideline should be 1/2″ (13 mm) below the top edge of the card, and the other should be 1/2″ (13 mm) above the bottom edge of the card.
Now, draw two more vertical guidelines. Each of these new vertical guidelines should be 3/8″ (10 mm) from the right and left edges of the card.
Next, draw half of a heart on the left side of the card. This heart should start at the vertical guideline, touch the top horizontal guideline, and touch the left vertical guideline before swooping down. It’s very important that you leave about 3/16″ (5 mm) of space between the bottom of this side of the heart and the bottom horizontal guideline!
At this point, it’s time to draw the right half of the heart. Your starting point will be about 3/16″ (5 mm) underneath where you started for the left half of the card. This half of the heart should not touch the top horizontal guideline, but it should touch the bottom horizontal guideline.
Now, use your preferred pen and nib combination and white ink to add flourishes to your Valentine’s Day card. If you aren’t sure what types of flourishes to draw (or if flourishes kind of terrify you), see this tutorial.
If you want to, you can slip a word or two in the heart. Can you spot the “love”?
Continue to draw flourishes — and maybe a couple of words — until your heart is full (both literally and figuratively)!
Once the white ink has mostly dried, grab your eraser and use it to get rid of the vertical and horizontal guidelines that you made. (Leave the vertical guideline that runs through the middle of the heart. The white ink probably isn’t dry enough to handle an eraser yet!) Moisten your gold watercolor with a bit of water. Once the water has had a chance to sit a bit, mix the gold up and load it onto your nib (like in this tutorial).
You can randomly place your hearts, or you can connect some of them in a line like I did below. Notice that I made both solid hearts and empty heart outlines, but you can choose one or the other if you’d prefer!
At this point, grab your X-Acto knife and a self-healing cutting mat, if you have one. Use your X-Acto knife to cut along the heart outline.
It is very important that you do not cut the the lines highlighted in dark blue below. Otherwise, your heart will fall out of the card!
Grab your eraser, and use a light touch to get rid of the white pencil guidelines along the outside of the heart. Then, carefully twist the right side of the heart behind the card and the left side of the heart toward you (or vice versa). Your twist-out Valentine’s Day card is now finished!
I do intend to send this card off, but I’m definitely going to let it sit on the shelf for a week or so. I love the way the light bounces off of that Arabic gold in the evenings, especially when we’ve got the fireplace going. It’s so pretty!
If you have any questions about this tutorial, please feel free to ask! I’m more than happy to help you. If you decide to make it, please post your results! I love seeing reader creations on Instagram (@thepostmansknock, #thepostmansknock). Happy Valentine’s Day, and thanks so much for reading!
Warmly,
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