Valentine's Day Cards

I think I signed up for a few too many V-day swaps! I felt like I did nothing but V-day cards this week and ended up hating most of them. These are a few that I did like though. Once I finally moved away from the pre-made Valentine stuff I had and started from scratch I enjoyed the process much more and these cards were the result.

I started out with the one on the bottom. I call it "Opposites Attract". When I started I wasn't thinking 'Valentine's Day', I was thinking 'what do I want for breakfast?' My husband had left a crushed styrofoam cup on top of the trash so I pulled it out and started doodling on it while thinking about the whole breakfast thing. The little spirals started turning into hearts here and there and I liked the way they looked so I cut up the cup, slathered it with red paint and used it to stamp on some card stock. The result was the background behind the black and white heart on "Opposites Attract" as well as the red background heart on the "LOVE" card. I liked the effect so much that I just kept playing with it. I started making those little doodle hearts and spirals on other scraps of paper. I especially like the way they looked in gold ink on the black rice paper, that's why there's so much of it. I never did get around to breakfast btw.

The first card is a leftover from the finger painting swap I participated in a few weeks ago. I cut up most of the leftovers from that process to use as backgrounds and shapes in other cards. (I don't think I ever throw out any scraps anymore!) I was feeling uninspired that day and bored with some of the cards I had made so I just started playing with the paint. I kept looking through the scrap bin and those finger painted cards kept calling my name. I had SO much fun with those! So I pulled one out and decided to throw a couple of ugly heart tags that I had lying around on it and spatter paint it. Several coats of red acrylic spatters later I had something that started to talk to me. When I pulled of the hearts I found that one of them had a black streak through it that I liked so I made more lines which made the hearts pop a little more. Then I noticed that the original fingerpainted background had a nice swooshy pattern that made the hearts look like they were going to crash. I used gold ink to play up the swooshy effect then couldn't decide if I liked it so I called it a day. The next day I decided that it looked like two hearts on a collision course. I found myself wondering if they'd actually collide or if it would be a near miss. I thought about how it kind of reminded me of fate. Maybe those two hearts were soul mates and were meant to collide so that they could fulfill their destiny. I decided I liked it and called it "Collision Course".