North 7th & Bedford

After weeks and weeks of being my indecisive self I finally was able to nail down a save the date…I kept going back and forth between doing a picture Save the Date or doing something a little less traditional. I went with the latter.

I, very much like a lot of you out there, am obsessed with Rifle Paper Co. Anna makes the most amazing stationary and ever since I discovered her work four years ago I knew I wanted our wedding invitations to be made by her. Of course, at this point I’m sure she has no time to return emails and actually design ours so I took it upon myself to make our save the dates using her work as inspiration.

I found the perfect Save the Date here and  re-created it. First, I blew up the picture and pulled out my light box from when I was at Parsons. Then, I found some pretty thick paper to paint on. I wanted the backdrop to be a little less flat so I used Speckelton paper to get some dimension. I used goauche to give the picture the paintbrush look that Anna does so well. I had to do this in parts because when working with goauche it’s difficult to achieve the same color twice. I had to mix each color first, paint every flower in that color and the move on to the next flower, leaf or accent. For the caricature of Spencer and I it was  little more difficult. I didn’t want to ruin the flower heart so I painted us separately (I did a few tries) and then Photoshopped us into the heart once it was scanned. Something important I learned – if you’re using black at all make sure you do the light parts of the painting first and always make sure the colors are dry before you add the black. If you see my first attempt of me (pictured above) you can see my eye bled because when I added the black the flesh color still had not dried up…

This was a super fun project and I’m actually thinking of doing the same thing for our invites. We’ll see how I feel about that in a few months!