Wedding Suite Part 2: Programs

Wedding Program Booklet

For the wedding programs, Rosalyne wanted to include some of the beautiful photos taken on their engagement photo-shoot with Karl Ko in the Bay Area. On the front is a close-up of the happy couple holding hands. We got a embosser made with their names, the wedding venue, and the date and used that on the photo which I printed onto Arches Text paper. The programs are about 4 inches square, with an 1/8″ spine.

Inside front

When you open the navy blue booklet, you see the same hand-painted gingham pattern from the inviations. But the surprise is that it opens out into an accordion, to match the invitations:

(The accordion is printed on Moab Kayenta paper, which I highly recommend for great clarity of prints.)

Front open

And the other surprise is that if you turn over this accordion…

Inside back

It has more info, as well as another cute picture of Wes and Rosie!

Back closed

Such a photogenic couple!

Oh, the miles of double sided tape that went into making this! You could stick the whole length of the Great Wall of China.

A Wedding Suite

As a wedding gift for my best friend Rosalyne, I offered to make their invitations and all the printed matter for their wedding. Wedding invitations are interesting to do because there are so many pieces that you can extend a theme to: Save the Date cards, RSVP cards, favors, programs, thank you cards, directions, coasters, napkins, signage, etc. It’s up to the bride and groom to decide how much they want to be included in the theme.

Rosalyne’s wedding took place in Hawaii (and lucky us who got to travel there to be a part of it!), but she didn’t want the style of her graphics to be tropical or beachy. She was more drawn to a romantic, vintage, but with sweet personal touches. She wanted to tell the story of how she and her fiance, Wes, met and the adventures they had been on. We did this through watercolor illustrations of places and moments along with handwritten, whimsical text that wound its way around the pictures.

Invitation with illustration of the couple

Rosalyne wanted to use an accordion style structure, which is nice because it lets their story be revealed gradually.

First panel

Middle Panel

Last panel

And in the last panel is the actual invitation to the wedding, after Wes’ romantic proposal to Rosalyne!

Whole invitation

And to add a little bit of the romantic vintage feel, I lined the envelopes with this beautiful floral printed Japanese paper.

Envelope lining

More in the next post!

Business Cards Part Deux: This time it’s personal

When I needed to make a new batch of business cards for myself this summer I decided I had to live up to my own company’s name and make sure there actually was some evidence of my hands all up in there.

And there’s nothing I love more than a whole bunch of one thing, where each one is a little different.

Here’s what happens when you mix those two things together!

(p.s. the third ingredient was the awesome squirrel hair watercolor brush I bought, and I guess fourth was my collection of watercolors and gouaches. {yeah, that’s how you spell it} )

Ya gotta catch it before they take it down for copyright infringement because I used real music.

{It’s “Knock that Door” by the group Enon, if you liked it and wanted to know.}

-Edit-

Here’s another video where you can see the flipbook version of the above video. No music though.
But you can hear the flippy sound of the paper.

P.S.

and also

Evolution of a Business Card

One of the best things about my job is when I can work with a client to create an end product that they didn’t necessarily even imagine at the beginning. Recently I finished a job of creating business cards for a personal shopper.

I started by offering 3 different directions that we could go, based on several graphic styles my client likes:

Chinoisie direction

Laurel wreath direction

Calligraphic line direction

A bunch of stylish clothes all mishy-mashed together in line drawing

Gisella chose the calligraphic line direction. So from there, she asked for some slight revisions of the shapes of letters, and the addition of a butterfly (a symbol that is important to her), and some tweaks to the hanger and frame around her name. The back was changed quite a bit because she preferred a feeling of order rather than the jumbled clothing that I started with. Once Gisella was completely satisfied with the design, I sent out for negatives from Stats Prepress in order to make polymer plates to print letterpress. Here’s what the finished plate for the blue layer looked like on the press:

The yellowy thing is a steel backed polymer plate. The ink is on the blue rollers and puts a thin layer of ink on the raised surfaces of the plate. Woo, industrial age technology!

These are all the backs of the cards printed with ink jet and sprayed with a protective glaze layer:

mmmm, protective glaze. arhlarhllarh...

This is the big ol’ cutter that I cut the cards apart with. I like to end my sentences with prepositions, and I’ll never stop.

Technically, it's called a board shear.

I poked the holes in the cards with a great tool called a “Japanese screw punch”. It also sounds like an awesome karate move.

Japanese screw punch to the head!

Ok, here are the finished guys with baker’s twine looped into the holes to complete the shopping tag feel. Rounded corners also.

Look at that big pile of bakers twine!!

And finally, here is what the back of the card ended up looking like:

(Clockwise from top left) dress, blazer, necklace, and shoes

A great project that I was glad to get to work on. Thanks, Gisella & good luck with your business!

A process

A very very great friend of mine got married recently, and to send the proper kind of good wishes and congratulations, I decided to draw a card for them. I started by drawing in pencil a simple message in a Copperplate style of calligraphy. But then the curlicues—oh the curlicues! They started sprouting out of every ascender, descender, finial and …some other word.

The curlicues! Oh the curlicues!

I showed it to my husband who thought it needed some more variation in line. Too much of the same. So the curlicues grew sproutlings:

Look at them sprouting everywhere. It's almost like an infestation.

So a nice little monochromatic card was ready. But for a spring wedding, it needed a little sprinkling of color. Some pale green and pink.

The Colorful Sproutlings—so springy

Painted while watching Celebrity Apprentice. Is that shameful?

The Donald Says No; not shameful

Egg-vidence of the Hand? Terrible.

My friend Tanya taught me how to make Ukranian Easter eggs, called Pasenki Pysanky. We sat down and made a few before Easter. It is a wax-resist dying process. First you draw on the egg with melted wax:

Sorry it's a little blurry. This is Tanya's Hawaii themed egg.

Then you dunk it in dye of whatever color you want:

This one is red.

Then after doing this a bunch of times with different colors, you remove the wax by melting it off.

you gotta melt it, then wipe it, then melt some more, then wipe some more

And at the very end you end up with something, like or unlike these:

warm colors egg

giant squid egg

Super fun! Thanks Tanya!

Cactus people

We visited Anza Borrego to see the desert bloom yesterday, and lo and behold! We witnessed these adorable but painful creatures populating the dusty roadsides. They are such happy-to-know-ya cactus.

Mr. Spike Tingleberry-Thornton

Mrs. Quilly Bristlebaum

Ms. Barb Tingleberry

Spike Jr.

And then there was this guy:

The Weirdo

It’s best not to mess with him. He’s a lonely stranger wandering the desolate desert plains. And also hills. But definitely lonely.

p.s. These things are called Teddybear Cholla. Have you ever heard a cuter name in all creation? Here’s the link
But watch out, cuz

The teddy-bear cholla is extremely flammable.

Thanks for warning me, wikipedia.

Time to be Awesome

Oh man, I abandoned my last blog because it was too much pressure to say something interesting and or relevant and or funny and or something. But this time, I’ll just write whatever I feel like and who cares if it’s any of the aforementioned aforementionables. But at least I can keep track of progress and images of projects I’m working on over time. Oooh, like a diary. But for my work.