Valentine's Day Cards, how can you make your own cards ? Ideas for romantic cards.

One of the best way to arrive at an image that you like is to experiment with lots of variations until you find the one that suits your design idea. You can use an editing programme to turn a photo into a 'artistic version' of the image. When you work on an image as you edit it be prepared to adjust the strength of color in your image and keep in mind that the color of the card you print your image on may affect the colors that appear in the final image.

If you make your own Valentine's Day card you will need to find a suitable idea or image to use on the front of the card. Creating your own image for card making is not difficult, if you are able to use photo editing you can make an image quickly, with simple adjustments. If you do not have access to this then you will need to be a bit more inventive in the way you produce your images.

Firstly you need to decide what type of Valentine's Day card you want to send. You can pick a theme to help with this, do you want to send a romantic card or a humorous greeting? Do you want flowers, hearts and romance to be the theme or something that is personal such as a photo of the two of you together ?

1. Select or create an image for the Valentine Card's front page.

This could be a romantic image, a stylized heart shape, flowers or even a photo of you or of both of you.

2. You will also need a piece of card in a suitable color to make the card from and an envelope of the correct size to put it in.

As hearts are associated with Valentine's Day one of the easiest ways to create a card for this occasion is to use a heart shape as the basis for your design.

One of the fastest ways to do this is to find a suitable photo/image and to edit it in a photo editing programme, using a heart shape to mask it into a heart.

However if you are not familiar with using photo editing to make images then scroll down the page for other simple ways to make some great Valentine's Day Cards.

Make sure you images size will fit well onto the front of the card, this may take a bit of trial and error so it is a good idea to run a test run on a plain piece of paper in the printer first.

For children. A simple way to make images for a card is to cut out a heart shaped template (heart shape to use as pattern) in different sizes. Now look through magazines with brightly colored pages and draw around your template and cut out different colored and sized hearts. Use the cut out heart shapes to decorate the front of your card. If the children are young cut out the shapes for them from colored paper or old cards and let the children glue the hearts onto the front of the card they are making(use a glue that is safe for small children to handle). They may like to have cartoon characters etc. mixed in with the heart shapes. You can print verses out to go inside the card for them to pick the one they like best, or print out simple individual words ( Happy, Valentine's, Day, to, love from,etc,) and help them to glue them onto the inner page to say what they want, then they can add their own name.