Words and Vines Valentine’s Day Card Tutorial

This artistic Valentine’s Day card is a sweet project to send to any loved one! As a bonus, it will help you practice various styles of lettering and foster basic watercolor skills. This tutorial isn’t difficult to create, and it’s endlessly customizable! Change the words, the colors, and the shape and size of the card to fit your needs.

1. Draw a Heart

To make this Valentine’s Day card, begin by using a pencil to freehand draw a large heart on the front of a blank watercolor card. (You can DIY a watercolor card by folding a piece of watercolor paper in half.)

2. Add Lettering

Now, begin filling in your Valentine’s Day card with content. First, moisten your red watercolor paint with some water and wait for a few moments. When the paint is nice and hydrated, you can use it to write words. In the example below, I used a mixture of dip pen watercolor calligraphy and paintbrush lettering to write “love” in four different languages.

Continue to write different words for “love” in various font styles. Don’t worry about their positioning; no matter where you put them, the heart will look good!

Finish up by painting red hearts to fill up any large negative spaces. Once you finish painting the hearts, clean your brush and moisten some dark green watercolor paint.

3. Add Vines and Leaves

Before you can paint leaves on this Valentine’s Day card, you need to make vines to connect them to. To paint vines, dip a small-ish brush into your green watercolor paint. Use the brush to make a curl like the one pictured below.

Continue to create green curls around the card. The curls should weave around the letters and the hearts to fill in space. When your card looks similar to the example below, it’s time to start painting leaves.

To make the leaves, paint small almond shapes that connect to the vines that you drew. The colors of your leaves will vary depending on the concentration of water to paint on the paintbrush. The sightly different shades of green will give the leaves a nice, natural-looking effect.

Make sure that your leaves are fairly dense and that they barely go outside of your pencil outline. Paying heed to both of these things will ensure that the heart is immediately identifiable as such!

4. Erase Pencil Guidelines and Send

Once the watercolor has dried (~5 minutes), you can gently go over the pencil outline with an eraser. When the pencil outline is gone, the result will be an artistic card that is ready to send to any loved one!

If you have time, you can send the card out in style with a beautifully calligraphed envelope! The brown paper envelope below features a white Flourish Formal name, a Sans Serif address, and a stamp collage.

I hope that you enjoyed today’s short tutorial, and that your 2024 is off to a lovely start! Many thanks for reading TPK — it makes me happy that you’re here, and I appreciate it very much. I would send every person who reads this blog one of these cards if I could!

Warmly,

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