Process: Heart's Day 2018 (Patreon)

I started making Elder Scrolls themed Valentines day cards in 2016. My first set were strictly digital, featuring famous quotes on minimalist backgrounds. Last year's set were linocuts with punny messages, printed with stampads.

In this post I'll walk through the creation of this year's card, seen above, which will be sent out to you guys as well as other members of the community.

After a lot of sketches and ideas, I settled on this one. I drew it in SketchBookX on my phone, and, while it was a lot simpler than some of my other ideas, I thought it was pretty dang cute.

Next, I brought it over into Photoshop, where I cleaned up the shapes using both vectors and hand-drawn portions. I also touched up the anatomy a bit to better match the TES3 model. I decided to ditch most of the hearts in the background for a cleaner look, but did add a bit more detail inside the guar. 

The text was added in Adobe Illustrator, using the Type on Path tool. The font used is Baloo, available from Google. 

Next up... the fun part! I reversed the image and printed it, then transferred it to a rubber block by covering the back in charcoal and tracing over the contours. Then I trimmed the block to size and started carving. 

Rubber is very soft and much, much easier to carve than traditional linoleum. The softness also means that you can't get the same sort of precision and small detail that you can out of lino. For the most part, it works great on smaller, simpler pieces like this one, but letters are always a pain. 

Once the carving was complete, I made a test print using a couple of stamp pads and some multimedia paper. It doesn't look great, but it does show the areas that could use a little more cuttin away. So I did just that. 

For the first series of final prints, I went with black and red waterbased ink by Speedball, on recycled cards from Strathmore. Of the ten cards I printed, seven came out well, which is a pretty good rate as far as I'm concerned. You can see one of them above, in the header of this post. Since I plan on making more than just seven, I'll be experimenting with other inks, paints, and papers.