With Valentine’s day just around the corner, we have created this tutorial to help you create a Valentine’s Day card for your loved one, we will teach you some nice techniques that could improve your experience and also help you make a great gift.
Tutorial Details
- Program: Adobe Illustrator & Adobe Photoshop
- Version: CS5
- Difficulty: Beginner
- Number of Steps: 12 steps
- Estimated Completion Time: 45 minutes
Valentine’s Day Card Design
To create our Valentine’s Day Card we are going to use both Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. We will be using Illustrator to create our love hearts and Photoshop for the overall design, creating our glows and effects.
Final Result – What You’ll Be Creating
Step 1
Our first step is to create our love hearts, so open up Illustrator and create a new document. Select the Ellip tool and draw a circle whilst holding down shift , this will ensure that you get a perfect circle. Hold on to the alt key while selecting the first circle and drag, this will duplicate your current shape.
Step 2
Hold shift whilst you drag to copy towards the right, this will ensure that your circles are aligned while you move them. Overlap the circles slightly then open the path finder window by going to Windows > Pathfinder. Select both of your circles and hit the expand button while pressing alt. this will join both of your circles your circle will look now something like this.
Step 3
Click on the direct selection tool (Shortcut A) and select the node in the middle whilst pressing shift drag it down a bit something like this…
Step 4
We now need to adjust the shape of the heart. Start by deleting the two anchor points as illustrated…
Step 5
Now adjust the angles of the four anchor points as shown to create our perfect heart shape.
Step 6
Now we are going to head over to Photoshop and create a new document, we are going to fill in the background with the color #80000d, then we are going to grab the rectangle tool and create a bar all the way across in the middle of our document. We are going to add a layer style, so double click your layer and add the following settings to the layer.
Step 7
Next we are going to import our love heart from illustrator into Photoshop. Once we have our love hearts in Photoshop we are going to move the layers below the bar we created in the previous step, and add the following layer styles to our love hearts. Starting with the Inner Glow.
Step 8
Followed by the Bevel and Emboss settings.
Step 9
Color Overlay.
Step 10
And finally the Gradient Overlay.
Step 11
We are going to add some text so go and grab the Lobster Font, and we are going to type out HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY and give it the following layer style.
Step 12
Our Valentine’s Card is now nearly complete, all we need to add is some glow to the card, we are going to do this by grabbing the eclipse tool and creating a circle behind our love hearts, we are then going to add a filter > blur > gaussian blur and set the radius to 117.5. Now set the layer to overlay.
Finish
We have now complete our Valentine’s Day Card Design. You could add more sparkle to the card if you wished to make it stand out more. I hope you’ve enjoyed this Photoshop tutorial and you can apply the techniques to future projects.
We have also provided you with the working project file for this tutorial which you can grab below.
