Whilst part of the design itself was originally meant to be a tribute to the meatloaf album cover design of "Bat out of Hell", after finding out about this competition I simply had to give creating a valentines card for this competition a shot.
While the design is still very heavily inspired by the gothic look of the album cover of "Bat out of Hell" that was designed by Richard Corben, as seen with its use of a simular font with its text. The design was also heavily influenced by the gothic artwork of british artist Anne Stokes, whose works often include various beautiful women alongside (and in some artworks are seen taming) various fantastical beasts both real and mythical such as Dragons, unicorns and even wolves.
Whilst most would choose Nancy Thompson to be alongside freddy in their designs (after all Nancy was the original Survivor girl in the series, not to mention one of the most famous scream Queens in all of horror cinema), I decided to include Alice Johnston from "A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master" instead, as I've often seen her as being the polar opposite to Freddy (she's shy and quiet whilst he's Loud and aggressive), not to mention they also share a few similarities (they were both red heads at one point, both had rhymes associated with them and they both had dream powers that were on par with each other), quintissentially Alice was the feminine to freddy's Masculine.
For the design I wanted it to incorporate both elements from the album cover designs of meatloaf's "Bat out of Hell" parts 1, 2 and 3 and the artwork of Anne Stokes whilst also being in a way reflective of the storyline of A nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master but with a Romantic Twist. In the end I decided that I would have the design sort of set in the ruins of a Gothic Church with a stained glass patterned window with a heart in its centre to be the central focus of the piece, with Alice taming Freddy in the form of a Dragon (Freddy symbolically representing her personal fears and anxieties), so that by learning to no longer fear him, she is able to accept and overcome them so that she can allow herself to grow as a person and also so she can finally learn to love herself for who she truly is, simular to what happens to Alice in the plot of "A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master".