A little peek inside a custom order

Have you ever wondered how a custom order takes shape? Here's a little peek behind the scenes of a recent custom order for some lovely clients. Marisa and Noah contacted me because the wedding invitations they ordered elsewhere had taken a turn for the worse, and they were hoping to start over with something that would be a better reflection of the fun and whimsical yet chic wedding they hoped to have. Their timeline was extremely tight, so we jumped right in to the design process.

The theme for their wedding was "Alice in Wonderland", so they wanted to incorporate some imagery inspired by the Mad Hatter's tea party with towering stacks of teacups. They had their text in mind, and part of it talked about jumping down the rabbit hole together, so I know I wanted to include rabbit hole imagery, and building that into the trunk of a tree seemed to be a good plan. I started sketching with pencil on paper and then translated that into a digital drawing via my Wacom tablet.

The first version of the design looked like this:

Here are a couple of close-ups:

(identifying details have been changed in these images and smudged out in the following photos)

They liked the overall concept and the rabbit hole, key, and the bottle with the "drink me" tag, but they asked if there was a way to make it look more storybook like. I suggested that we try painting it with watercolors to add in that hand-drawn feel that would give it a dreamy quality. They were game to give that a go, so I printed out just the image outlines onto watercolor paper and painted all the details in with watercolor paints. Here is how it turned out:

Once it was dry, I scanned the artwork back in, cleaned everything up in Photoshop, and brought the image into Illustrator for some finishing work and typesetting. The final printed version of the suite turned out like this:

 I just love how the finished version has that storybook feel. The typefaces added whimsy and fun and really helped to highlight the lighthearted but still elegant text that the couple had written. This was such a fun project, and I look forward to creating more watercolor invitation designs in the future.  Thanks, Marisa and Noah, for being so open to new ideas and for being such fun to work with!