Design a Valentine's Day Card

I hope you all enjoyed this card challenge designed to end on today’s Valentine Day. There were some beautiful, but unfortunately, plain photo entries which couldn’t be selected for consideration because they didn’t stick to the brief of adding a humorous or romantic message.

Here you’ve cleverly combined two elements of the brief by photographing your own personalised text within a minimalist setting. Your ‘LOVE’ written inside a blacked out room, with a red flash light, has the very sexy allure of a highly passionate temptress. The hint of a heart shape within your amorous, joined-up lettering makes this a sultry Valentine’s Day invitation to which any hot-blooded lover couldn’t fail to respond.

This is a warm-hearted proposal from a very cold heart. You’ve made good seasonal use of the recent spell of winter weather with your romantic gesture of half submerging an engagement ring in deep snow for your true love to find. Your macro shot of the red hot ruby is enough to melt any girl’s heart once she’s unsuspectedly led to find the red ring in the virgin white snow. Turning this loving gesture into a Valentine card is hopefully the icing on your wedding cake.

Your aerial view of a three-dimensional gold heart centrally placed within the wide expanse of a red background makes for a strong minimalistic composition. With a simple red burning candle you have added the creative touch that inflames your Valentine card. I don’t know which came first, the photo idea or the wording, but they are both romantically linked just like all burning hearts should be.

This very quirky Valentine card appeals to my sense of the absurd. It looks as if a sad mountain rescue dog is in search of a bit of love on a snowy hillside by desperately propositioning a completely disinterested black crow. Perhaps your quaint photo is a visual metaphor of unrequited love that many of us have at sometime sought only to have been painfully spurned. The muted background colour palette works very well to offset your red stitched-on speech bubble. I hope your forlorn pooch eventually finds a perfect partner and they enjoy making many beautiful puppies together.

These are beautifully crafted hand made clay tiles created and fire-glazed for this Valentine’s Day card challenge. You’ve expertly combined your two passions of making ceramics and taking photographs to artistically produce a superbly designed entry. I love the freehand drawings on your three-dimensional tiles and the way you’ve displayed them in a higgledy-piggledy layout. The black outlined red heart leaping out of the page is complimented by the unfussy mix of sans serif and italicised script. Mine would be a happy Valentine’s Day if I received this card.

This is a very cute image of a squirrel picking off daisy petals, one-by-one, to see if the last remains petal ends on ‘she loves me’ or ‘she loves me not’ as it alternates between the likely outcomes. Your two realistically edited photos work extremely well to create a very charming Valentine card which should appeal to all animal lovers. The green panel with its white text makes good use of the empty space in the top right-hand corner. Maybe a safer option of the squirrel’s daisy petal, guessing game, would have been for him to recite ‘she loves me’ and ‘she loves me lots’.

If truth be told most Valentine cards are a bit cheesy but this one makes no apologies for exploiting its very cheesiness. This simple porcelain heart dish and cover are used to great effect by placing a piece of same-shaped cheddar cheese inside. The love hearts stand out strongly against the amorous red background and the well-spaced, humorous message is perfectly positioned. I certainly hope that the cheddar helps to melt your Valentine’s heart. If not - hard cheese!

A bottle of bubbly, a couple of champagne flutes with discretely attached pink and blue love hearts, some soft lighting and a single red rose. This is the perfect setting to celebrate a romantic night on Valentine’s day. Your enchantingly arranged Valentine still life photo has the classic alluring ingredients for a passionate night. What better way to woo your sweetheart than with the aphrodisiac of love.

This colourless bunch of roses makes perfect sense once you’ve read the punchline to your poetic prose. This is great use of, what looks like, a bouquet of flowers a bride might be holding on her wedding day. Good use too of the subtle white lettering allowing the red keylined message to take centre stage. This is a blindingly funny Valentine day’s card to which I respond with “Roses are red, violets are blue, you’ve spelt ‘you’re’ wrong, but I forgive you”.

This is a very beautifully written sentiment for a Valentines card and has a very strong image supporting the sentiment. Pity that you don’t give any information about your photo so I’ll give you the benefit of doubt that this scene was exactly as you saw it but I have a sneaky suspicion that a bit of cloudy blurred magic was at play here. The giant net reminds me of an American Indian’s dreamcatcher talisman which helps to capture true love as soon as it’s seen written in the clouds.