Handmade Tween Valentines

There loads of great ideas on the web and Pinterest for handmade school Valentines. Here's my Be Mine Sweet Valentine board …

I had quite a few glow stick bracelets leftover from Halloween and I was going to save them for next year, but then I was inspired by all the "You make my heart glow" cards. Perfect use for those extra glow bracelets!!

I went to my favorite photo editor site, PicMonkey, to throw together a quick design. Ombre background of dark pink to light pink, a cute heart in the middle and the simple message. It was sweet, but my daughter is 9 years old. So, for a tween, this is a very basic and boring layout (not to mention 'so not cool'). I struggled with how to make this work for her. In the end, I decided to let her play around with the layout and tweak it on PicMonkey. And here's what she did:

Pretty darn cool! She played around with the Sweetheart theme, and added some Bokeh Hearts, Doodle Hearts, Doily Hearts and more Hearts. Then here's when the magic happened … she went to the Curves section in Effects and just moved those settings around until she was happy with how it looked. Ta Dah!

Curves is in the advance part of Effects (scroll down to the bottom). In order to use it you have to be a PicMonkey Royale member. However, I believe you can easily do this if you have basic photoshop, though I haven't tried it yet. It might be worth experimenting to see what you can do.

It always amazes me what children can do with art. They are so free from the fear of making a mistake and blissfully experiment to their heart's content. We, as adults, should remember to embrace this fearless way of creating art. Truly there are no wrong or right ways to do it, and accidents are usually happy ones.

Have a joyous and creative day!! ~Janet <3 p="">