DIY Watercolor Valentine's Day Card Designs

Hi everyone, this is Nia and today I'm going to create a couple of very simple Valentine's Day cards that you can DIY for next week if you have any one in mind. They're just a set with the same type of flowers but I decided to change the colors so you have two variations or you can also create your own color combinations. For the flowers, I kept it simple as five petaled flowers and I made the ends a little bit frilly. I've personally painted a lot of these flowers before so I feel quite comfortable drawing them in different angles however you can just paint them facing straight up with a silhouette of a circle or if you want to play with the angle very slightly the silhouette will turn into more of an oval or even a bowl shape where you can see a bit more of the petals at the back and the petals in front will be much more foreshortened and this will create a slight curve to those petals which makes the center look a bit deeper. Of course you can also play with the tilt to the left or the right creating different variations so your composition can look more natural. After that I'm just going to add the stem that connects to the center of the flower. You can draw these out as many times as you'd like as practice because I'm going to be painting them freehand or you can also draw them out very lightly before painting them if you'd like but you have to be very careful when you're drawing them out. Make sure your sketches are very light so the pencil marks won't show through. As an additional element, I also like to add smaller flower buds just to give slightly different textures. I'm also going to add leaves if I need to expand the size depending on how big the background will be. These are just going to be very simple card designs. It took me less than 15 minutes to create each one but if you have more time you can also include different flowers as well. Okay next I'm going to go over the colors I'm going to use for the first design. This is Aquarius Green by Roman Schmal, Permanent Yellow Deep by Holbein, Cerulean Blue by Holbein, Ultramarine Finest by Schmincke, and Gray of Gray by Holbein. I'm also going to use Bleeproof White by Dr. Ph. Martens. As for the writing, I'm going to use my Fudenosuke Tombow pen or you can use any ink pen you have. Now let's start to paint. Apologies for my dirty palette already since I've already made a trial of this. I'm going to create a heart shape background from a mix of Gray of Gray and Cerulean Blue. I'm just using a light to medium consistency here and I've decided to create a heart shape because it's for Valentine's Day but you can also create a blob or an abstract shape for the background as well. You can see that it's a bit streaky but I personally don't mind because I like the background to have a little bit of texture. Then I'm just going to dry this off completely so I can paint the flowers right on top of it. Since the heart here is fairly small, I only have space to create a few flowers so this one is going to be simpler than the second design. Keeping with the blue theme, I want the flowers to be blue and I used a mixture of Ultramarine Finest and Cerulean Blue starting with a medium consistency. Since the flowers are fairly small, you can see that parts of the petals are puddling up and I like to control the puddles by taking off the excess with a clean dry brush. I use the dry bristles to suck up the extra paint and water and I dab off the excess with tissue. After doing this, the center should still be damp and I like to add in a darker blue with more Ultramarine Finest in the ratio and I also use a slightly thicker consistency and due to the damp surface, the darker blue will somewhat just spread out naturally creating a nice variation in color. By the way, I also tried to keep the center of the flowers blank. I feel like this keeps the flower looking a bit more delicate as you have to place the petals a bit more further apart and I'd like to also add some yellow for the center later on so I tried to keep the center as light as possible. This way the yellow won't look too dull or contaminated. For the center, I use a very thick consistency of Permanent Yellow Deep. I'm just going to dot it in at the center but you want to make sure that the petals are completely dry so the darker blue won't travel to the center. I'm going to add another flower on the right to fill in the space but I want the left side to be a bit more dense compared to the right side so it looks more natural and I like to also play with the height later on but as for the flowers, I'm just going to treat it the same way as before. I feel like I have enough flowers for now so next I'm going to paint the stem. I'm going to use a thick consistency mix of Ultramarine Finest and Cerulean Blue and I've switched to my smaller brush. I want to direct the stem from the center of the flowers imagining where it's going to be placed under the petals and then continue downwards. I like to make it curved so it has a natural movement in the composition. Once I can see the position of the main flowers mostly done, I'm going to fill in the rest of the space, expand the composition and also play with the height by adding smaller flowers as well as budding flowers using the same color. For the flower buds, I basically just painted single flower petals but instead of adding darker blue at the bottom, I continued with the green sepals and the stem. Lastly, I'm going to add a bit of movement with some dots and dashes so there's a bit more dynamic in the composition. As a final touch, I felt like the flower still looks a bit too dense and it needs some lightness at the center so here I decided to create dotted outline to the yellow center using bleed proof white. Now all that's left is to add the text. I'm just going to do a very simple happy valentine's day. You can also write other things if you'd like. I'm also going to write with pencil first because I'm very bad at spacing. Then I'm going to go over it with pen. At first, I wrote everything in caps but I felt like it looks too bulky so I changed the valentine's to be written in script so it's a bit more dainty to suit the flowers. Once I'm done, I'm just going to erase the extra pencil marks that you can still see and that's it for the first design. Now let's move on to the colors of the second design. I'm going to use Aquarius Green again by Roman Schmal, Permanent Yellow Deep by Holbein, Crimson Lake by Holbein, Vermilion by Holbein, Titanium Gold Ochre by Schwenke. For the writing, I'm going to use my Tombow pen again. Okay, I'm going to paint a second version of the card. This time, I'm going to use warm colors so for the base of the heart, I used Titanium Gold Ochre and a light to medium consistency. I've also decided to make the heart a little bit bigger this time in case you want the cards to look a bit more full. Just like before, I'm going to dry it off with my hair dryer then I'm going to start painting the flowers. For the flowers, I used Titanium Gold Ochre with Vermilion as the base. For the petals, you can add more petals if you would like or you can stick to the five petals like I painted before. Personally, I like to mix it up by adding more petals or adding more frills and for the center this time, I'm going to add a slightly thicker consistency of Crimson Lake. Just like before, if there are any parts puddling, I will take the excess off using a clean dry brush before applying the darker red. After applying the Crimson Lake by itself, I see that the red is way too different tonality-wise so I decided to add a bit of Vermilion to the Crimson Lake this time. Then, I'm just going to keep adding more flowers until I have a good amount covering the heart. I feel like I have a pretty good amount. You can see this time I've painted way more flowers compared to the first design since it's a larger space to fill. Then, I'm just going to paint on the stems. This time, I've added Aquarius Green to the reds instead of the blue so the green is consistent with the color of the flowers. Once the flowers are all connected, I'm going to fill in the rest of the space with some flower buds but if there are any larger spaces I can fill, I'm going to add the fully bloomed flowers as well. Just like the flowers, I like to paint the flower buds a few at a time and before the paint completely dries, I'm going to connect it downwards with the green sepals. For a little bit of extra detail, I like to add in tiny little leaves under some of the flowers and if there are large enough space, I'm going to fill it in with larger leaves as well. Now, going back to the base color of the flowers, this is from Vermilion and Titanium Gold Ochre. I'm going to add the dots. I like to play with the size and shape. Sometimes, I turn them into ovals instead of circular dots because the extra added length from the ovals adds to the movements as now you can add direction to these ovals. For the center, I'm also going to use a very thick consistency of Permanent Yellow Deep but I can see that there isn't enough contrast to distinguish between the center and the petals so I'm going to add a thick consistency of Crimson Lake around the yellow circles. All that's left is the writing. I'm being a bit more careful this time with the spacing since I already know what it's going to look like and I tried to make it less wonky than the first design. Once I'm done, I'm going to erase the extra pencil marks making sure to leave a bit of time for the pen to completely dry so you don't accidentally smudge the writing. Then, as a last minute decision, I decided to curve the edges to give a softer look. I did this to one of my Christmas card designs last year and I quite like the soft look and I feel like it'll suit the softness of these flowers. You can, of course, use a corner punch for this but since I've lost mine, I'm just manually drawing out the curves then cutting them out with scissors. My lines were a bit scratchy so I'm just going to finish off by erasing them and here are the two simple designs. I hope you found this useful and easy enough to replicate for your DIYs. You can even coordinate the color combinations according to your Valentine's favorites. If you enjoyed this tutorial, please consider subscribing for more content every Friday. Like usual, the list of tools as well as my social media links will be in the description box. Thank you so much for watching till the end and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye!