Can you believe Valentine’s Day is next week?! If you’d like to DIY this year, this watercolor florals Valentine’s Day card in Adobe Illustrator can be created on a lunch break 😉 In this week’s tutorial, we create a quick and simple vector heart, then surround it with watercolor florals and a radial gradient background. It’s a print ready file, so you’ll be good to go for printing at home from start to finish. If you’re new to working with digital watercolor florals, there’s a free mini kit below to get you started!

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Create a Watercolor Florals Valentine’s Day Card in Adobe Illustrator

Mentioned in the video:

• Watercolor Leaves and Florals Kit
• Skinny Jeans font
• My favorite home printers + paper for cards!

Colors used in this tutorial (CMYK) 

• Light pink: 0/7/2/0
• Medium pink: 0/33/15/0
• Dark pink: 0/65/35/0

Grab your free watercolor florals mini kit here (if you’re already an Every-Tuesday subscriber, you can pick it up in the resource library):

Here’s the final outcome of this tutorial as a printed card!

Here’s a quick written overview of how we created our watercolor florals Valentine’s Day card:

To create your document:

• Create a document that’s 10″ wide by 7″ tall with a .125″ bleed on all sides. Keep your color mode CMYK if you’re printing this out at home (here are my printer + paper recommendations)
• Pull a guideline to the center of the document (at 5″). Create two filled rectangles, one for each side. On the right side rectangle, add a radial gradient, from white to medium pink.

To create the heart:

• Lock the background layer and create a new layer.
• Create a long (vertical) rectangle. Pull in its corners so they’re fully curved (if on an older version of illustrator, go effect > stylize > round corners).
• Rotate it 45*, duplicate and reflect over the y axis. Align until you get the desired heart shape. Use the pathfinder to cut away excess pieces, then unite remaining ones.
• Briefly unlock the background layer to center align the heart with the background. Re-lock the background layer.

To add florals:

• File > place in your florals, one at a time. Rescale, rotate and position behind the heart. Bring the top right florals to the front of all of your objects.
• Lock your heart + florals layer and create a new layer above it.

To add typography:

• On a new layer, set your typography. Because your other layers are locked, it’ll be easy to scale and adjust your typography without accidentally moving other objects.
• Design done!

To print:

• First, save your file as an Illustrator (.ai) file so you can edit it later on if you’d like to adjust anything.
• Next, file > save as and choose pdf. Uncheck ‘preserve illustrator editing capabilities’ for a smaller file size.
• Under the ‘marks and bleeds’ category, check ‘trim marks’ and ‘use document bleed settings’. Hit ‘save pdf’.
• Open the pdf and you’ll see your trim marks to cut your card down to size once printed. Done!