2022 Valentine's Day Patterns and Process

Say what you want about Valentine’s Day, I think it’s an opportunity to lean into the kitschy-ness of it all, own the red and pink color palette, and create some fun and colorful artwork.

I sourced some inspiration and settled on a few basic elements, like lips, eyes, heart glasses, x’s + o’s, and some squiggles.

I was happy with how the tiger turned out, but that idea was scratched as everything else came together. Most of the work I ended up using was more simple and inspired by playful, organic shapes, so it didn’t really fit.

The more organic look was achieved in different ways. In one case, I started in my sketchbook with just a marker, experimenting with a single motif before bringing it digital.

With other patterns, I was a bit more experimental. I used India ink to paint loose, funky shapes and play with the bleed of the ink and the mixing of the colors.

Then I scanned in my artwork, cleaned it up, and tweaked colors in photoshop. The updated art gave me a colorful pattern in photoshop and a flat, vector pattern I created in Illustrator. I experimented with color and scale for the vector-based pattern.

I kept it even more simple with the next two patterns, cutting out a few basic shapes with construction paper, collaging them together to scan.

After cleaning up the scans in photoshop, I vectorized the motifs and created seamless patterns in illustrator.

I designed several greeting cards using these patterns that you can check out, along with a few others here.

You can also shop these patterns on fabric for your Valentine’s Day DIY projects here.