Valentines for any time

This year after I finished all of my cute, punny, flowery valentines for Meals on Wheels, I wanted to do something a little nontraditional for my own valentines. Then one day while I was on Instagram, I saw a few posts featuring cut-paper collage artwork, and that gave me the inspiration I needed. So I pulled out the gel prints I didn’t use for making calendars, as well as the scratch paper from cleaning off my brayer while gel printing and some paper I painted to make a postcard last summer, and got to work. I did use hearts and some love-themed sentiments, but they're really cards that you could use any time.

Side note: Lately I've been doing my blog posts partly on the computer and partly on my phone or tablet. I've been taking pictures with my phone, and while they seem okay on the phone, they don't look great when I'm on the computer. I wish I were a great photographer, but I haven't had the time to focus on composing and editing photos. So I apologize for the less-than-stellar photos. Now, back to the valentines.

These card bases, which are about 5" x 7", are from two packs of pre-cut and -scored card bases that I've had forever. Since I was making non-traditional valentines, I decided to go with non-traditional colors, too.

For the punched hearts, I used my brayer clean-off paper. Basically it's the scratch paper I roll my brayer on when I want to switch paint colors while gel printing. I'll have to come up with a snazzier name for it. I glued six hearts onto each card base, and in the center of each heart I added a word that I stamped on white card stock and trimmed by hand. I doodled a border around each card abse and added accents around some of the hearts. (On the yellow card, I also added splatters of metallic watercolor paint before I glued on the hearts.)

Here is a peek inside the cards:

I stamped a quote from Helen Keller for the sentiment and added a mini punched heart for a touch of color.

Here are a couple more large (5"x 7") cards. I discovered that I really liked the larger format for this collage-style artwork. I am less of a fan of all the extra space inside the card, however, because I often don't have that much to write.

These hearts are punched from painted paper I originally made to create a postcard in honor of Eric Carle for a project last summer. For the card on the left, the background is a gel print, and I added three short sentiments on strips of white card stock. For the card on the right, I used a layout similar to the previous cards, but adjusted the spacing between the hearts so I could stamp and emboss a sentiment on the card base. I added more doodling on that card, too.

These two cards are smaller, I think about 4" x 5". (They were also from a pack of pre-cut card bases. I'm really trying to use some of these supplies that have been just sitting around.) Both of these backgrounds were gel prints. The left card has a painted-paper heart and embossed sentiment, and the right card has a brayer-sheet heart and a stamped sentiment cut into strips.

This batch of eight cards was probably my favorite. I used several "reject" gel prints to hand cut all the squares (approximately 2" x 2") and hearts, and it's so interesting how a print that doesn't look great as a whole sheet looks so much better when you have just a little piece of it.

I knew I wanted to use the sentiment "Do small things with great love," but I didn't have one in my stash that was the right style. So I got out an old set of small alphabet stamps and stamped them out myself. Then I cut out the individual words and glued one word over each heart. I wanted to bring in a little more white, so I used a white paint pen to draw a border around each square.

These cards inspired me to make another batch of gel prints, and I'm working on turning those into cards. Hopefully I'll be back to share some of those cards soon. I've also added a new "gel printing" category under the "Labels" section of my blog, so you can just click on that if you ever want to see gel press ideas. Thanks for stopping by!