Pink April Cherry Blossom Card | Spring Festival Greeting Card Design

This April continues a string of social upheavals that began in March. Meanwhile, cherry blossoms are in full bloom in many Northern Hemisphere countries. In Japan, for instance, March 15 to April 15 is the country’s famous national cherry blossom festival. Because Japan has the special geography of being long and narrow from north to south, the Japanese designed a cherry blossom front system, so that as the weather warms, the blossoms gradually open from south to north. Someone then coined the rather poetic name “April Cherry Blossom.”

Cherry blossoms represent life, passion, purity and nobility, and are also a symbol of love, romance and hope. Their flower language is life, smiling at you, spiritual beauty (mountain cherry), kind education (Western cherry), Eastern mystery (winter cherry), quietness and purity (double-flowered cherry), youth (primrose), and purity, nobility and detachment (mountain cherry blossom).

I myself have never been fond of pink — er, I mean pink — because I’ve been conditioned by color psychology.

Back in my student days, one of my favorite things was browsing the library, so I read widely across its collections. Once, in a book discussing feng shui and the occult, I found an argument that overturned my existing understanding, and for some inexplicable reason I believed it, which left a deep impression on me (in short, I was conditioned). The book stated that one taboo in home decoration is using pink heavily as the dominant color, on the grounds that pink easily causes nervous exhaustion, panic and irritability, creates a severe lack of security, makes people fickle and prone to betrayal, and brings frequent arguments and disputes to a household. Put another way, it’s not stable enough — the mood drifts.

A drifting mood does seem to have some connection to romance.

Of course, as I just said, this is only my personal stereotype. In fact, a color experiment was once conducted in a Swiss prison, where they placed easily enraged inmates in a cell with all four walls painted pink. The result proved that the pink cell had a certain calming effect on the prisoners.

Huh, isn’t that exactly a classic case of nervous exhaustion? (Flees at light speed)

April Cherry Blossom card (Designer / Jin-Liang, Lin)

This little pink card I’m introducing today was actually a design idea that suddenly popped into my head after seeing a friend’s Japanese kimono. The cherry blossom material came from Japan’s official cherry blossom promotion campaign. The real focus of the whole card is actually the white ribbon in the upper half, whose imagery comes from the sash that is the crowning touch of a woman’s kimono. I feel that rather than calling it a card, making it into an embroidered canvas coin purse would actually be a better choice.

Lastly, a side note: this time I finally managed to produce this month’s piece in April, without having to wait until a month later to see results as in the previous few months. That’s my spring resolution to myself.