WEdding invites: a Little Bit of detail

There comes a time, in every serious relationship, where the man (me)  must decide weather he has chosen his correct future Mrs.  I in fact came to make this very decision back in August of 2013.... I chose yes. So what I did was take my mom to the ring store for some back up. My mom did her recon and helped very much to choose the perfect wedding ring. 

After that I was stuck with the task of asking her father . it took me about three tries to finally build the courage to ask  for his permission, the first time I walked over to ask he was chopping wood... with an axe. which I realized immediately that I had to show him my worth as a man before I committed to asking him. I told him to take a break for a while.  In doing so I somehow cut a small slice in my back. I couldn't ask that day.... I had to ask a few days later after my embarrassment wore off.

then to pick the place, the only place I could think of was on our rock climbing trip. everything went perfectly. on the top of the highest peak we could climb I asked my best friend to merry me.

Now comes the good part :)

Since I am a graphic designer I also got to create my own wedding invites! this probably isn't something most guys are excited about but I just was. after a few different theme changes we finally came up with the only choice that made any sense. Adventure


So we wrote the story of us and how we met. I started some different concepts and the illustration. 
 

And what is a graphic designers wedding without a logo?

I knew right away the logo would have to look some how like a patch of some kind. I really liked the Idea of an achievement badge as we were achieving something very important. 

After the concepts and sketch stage was done I started thinking about different ways to illustrate my idea. I wanted the look to be very simple yet i also wanted the theme of adventure. I thought of a few different styles but the one I landed on was a 1960's style with hard lines and little curves. I fell in love with the style and knew the minute I saw it that it was the perfect style for the job. 

Looking at the color of the illustration I realized that if this were a true 60s illustration it would be a bit more likely if I was doing a one or two color job just to save on ink costs. (today's printing technology makes full color much more accessible) So I went with Blue and decided to print on a light tan card stock (Im so glad I did, they turned out better then I could have hoped)

I really liked the flat look to these but I wanted to ad some texture to make it look as though I drew them with a pencil. So I scribbled some charcoal on a rough sheet of paper and scanned it in. I then screened the texture over the illustration and varied the opacity on different colors.

this is the exact look I was going for, structured, classic, and subtle  

The finished product looks something like this. the natural colored card stock ads just the right amount of color and character to the invite. I couldn't be more happy with the way they turned out. I will have a nice photo of the finished product in my portfolio under illustrations in a few days.