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 ๐Ÿ˜‰ 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

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

Mentioned in the video:

Colors used in this tutorial (CMYK) 

  • Light pink: 0/7/2/0
  • Medium pink: 0/33/15/0
  • Dark pink: 0/65/35/0
watercolor florals mini kit

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!

watercolor florals valentine's day card
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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!

Download your free watercolor florals mini-kit!

Bonus!

Where should we send your watercolor florals kit?

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Written by
Every Tuesday's content creator and founder. I help creatives build and improve their digital skills to open new opportunities.
Latest comments
  • Beautifully demonstrated ๐Ÿ™‚

  • thank you so much for this free floral kit and for wonderful video

  • Great Tutorial. Very well presented in concise, but understandable terms. I have been using Adobe Illustrator for about a year and I learned several tricks I did not already know from this video. Thank you for posting. I am a new Every Tuesday Subscriber.

  • I love this! So cute.

    I have an Illustrator question for you–I’ve created an image and the strokes are all different sizes, but when I go to make the overall image smaller then the strokes don’t decrease, so then it becomes a big mess if I get much smaller. Overlapping and out of proportion. Any guesses of what I’m doing wrong? Or do I just need to create my images smaller to begin with? THANKS for all you do!

  • Hey Teela! May I ask if you hand paint your watercolor florals, then upload them into Illustrator, or do you create them digitally?

  • Thank you for this video, this card is beautiful…

  • Thank you so much!! I appreciate it!! <3

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