Valentine's Day cards

Sweet Cupcake

Part of my February design goals was to design a series of Valentine's Day themed cards. I went into a wonderful paper/card store the other day and looked at their Valentine's cards and they were all cheesy and in the same shade of red and pink D: When I first started to put these together the color scheme was no where near pink or red, they started out blue and black actually lol. But my new favorite and indispensible part of Adobe Illustrator CS3 is the color guide function. It makes picking your color schemes much easier, basically you just select a color and go to the color guide and it lists all that color's complements, analogs, compounds, etc. Best thing they ever added to that program in my opinion because color schemes are kind of difficult for me.

This cupcake design was inspired by a tattoo trend, usually when people think of tattoos they think of really scary things like skulls and what not. But a lot of girls love getting cupcake tattoos as evidence by this large gallery on flickr. The first time I ever saw one was in Inked magazine when they had a feature on Twinkie Chan.

It was a fun design to do and I love the color scheme, it complements the things that are illustrated and makes me think of yummy sweets and chocolate, although getting the right shape for the top of the cupcake took some time D:




I also wanted to do a design for men, when I sat down to think about what kind of tattoo inspired designs would be appropriate for men I realized that men get a lot of motifs and designs that are usually associated with women outside of the tattoo world. Whether that be roses or cherry blossoms in American style tattoo or Japanese traditional style. I bought Kat Von D's book which I will post more about later and I wanted to do some black & grey inspired roses along with this pistol design I originally made for a screenprint.
The trick was recreating a textured version in Illustrator, I really like how this design turned out, there's another version that says Death Before Dishonor, a Sailor Jerry reference and I thought it seemed appropriate given the content of the drawing.

Overall my goal was to create some designs that weren't totally conventional and that could also be used for any occasion just not the big hallmark holiday. Valentine's is a weird holiday, it creates really odd expectations on the part of men and women. Women are taught to expect roses, candy and jewelry and men are taught that that's what all women want and that's what they need to give them in order to make them happy on this day.
Frankly I find the whole roses and candy think corny and unoriginal, because its not like that guy put a lot of thought into buying those things right? Also there's that whole other underbelly of it where women are expected to give sex in return for the man's investment in $85 bouquet of roses and jewelry. LOL, in the end it ends up being really unromantic and just a headache for both parties involved.

I hope you all have a great Valentine's day be it with your friends or significant other.