The Machoism of a Card

One thing I learned during my early card making days was that it has always been difficult to make cards that look masculine - from the colour choices to the design, it has always been difficult to cater to the masculine feel to a card. There were too many rules to follow - no flowers, nothing exaggerated, pink is a no-no, nothing that looks feminine etc.. Anyways, ask any cardmakers, they would say similar thing - that masculine cards always give them headaches, and sometimes we always ended up making cards that look more feminine than masculine, hehe.

Oh well. I appreciate beauty so naturally I love seeing flowers on my cards, even though in reality I prefer food than flowers (unless they start making some edible flowers haha). I love using girlish pink in my cards, even though in real life pink wasn't even in my fav colour list. I love colours, but usually I use not more than 3 colours in a card.

So of course it's hard to find colours for cards dedicated to men. So my pick usually range from black, brown, grey, green and white. And a bit of red in between. But usually I choose black as the very base of a masculine card, but mix it with some other colours. As for the design, abstract would be a safe bet, but sometimes I do play with elements that doesn't look so feminine in my eyes (like musical instruments, menswear etc).

So when I receive requests to make cards for men, I had to think extra hard so that the receiver would appreciate the cards, instead of being embarrased about it (LOL!)

Last week I made a card for a friend, as she wanted one dedicated to her husband, who happens to be a fighter pilot, and a pianist. So I made this (in similar size to the lucky sweet 6 card):


Here's the zoom in for the roses: (click for rose tutorial here)


The most difficult part of making this card was of course, the roses! As seen in the tutorial, it looked easy to do, but try making 13 of them.. then you'll know what I mean. Everything needs to be properly placed, or else the roses won't look like roses hah! I used the roses to have that softer touch to the black and white card. And as Poa wanted this for her husband, it needs a more romantic look to it, so roses would be nice.. right?


Hope the card still looks masculine enough... :P

(Okay, confession time: Piano has always been my safest bet for a male card. But I can't keep making piano cards that are similar to each other! I never made the same card design twice, and even if I tried to, I always failed, and ended up with slightly different designs)

Just sharing, this was what one of my first piano cards looked like - smaller in size, and much simpler.


It looks okay, but not very practical as the flower was too big for the card, and wouldn't fit in the normal envelope. I guess I improved on that, a bit. :)