French Kiss Valentines Cards

A bespoke card design for the national Holliday of Valentines.

Riffing off the phrase ‘french kissing’ the design features a french coffee press serving two mugs, adorned with heart emblems, followed by a young couple locked in embrace.

The hand lettering is done in an embellished flowing style derived from a vintage french font from the 12th century.

The banners are inspired by the romantic and decorative banners embellishing the renaissance art of the 1400’s. Fittingly this era of art saw human figures with much more expression, gesture, and interaction with each other than previous artworks, making it an inspirational era of art for romantic and passionate subjects.

The larger hand lettering reads ‘JE VOUS AIME’ translating to ‘I LOVE YOU’ in English.

A note on materials and rendering:

The original artwork for this piece has been drawn with watercolour and coloured pencil. Working with traditional mediums, scanning in artworks and then working over these traditional drawings and paintings digitally, is my usual process. With this artwork however, much more of the original traditional sketch has been maintained. During the digital stage of the process, I found that overworking the illustration digitally caused the piece to loose some of its energy and that I wanted to suggest a sense of urgency and passion appropriate to the subject by keeping more of the original sketch and mark making visible.