They had already put in so much work to make their day exactly as they wanted it, so I had to create work which would fit the theme that was emerging. That theme was somewhere between a music festival and a village fete. So, in the early days when the Save The Date notices were being sent out, I tried to create a very bold, simple take on a 1960s music festival poster. Which meant balloon text, plenty of colour, and a kind of cartoony riff on art nouveau-style arches of text and image.
The design was created in one go in simple black ink on white bristol board at A4 and then scanned and reduced to A5. The colouring was all done, infuriatingly slowly, just using a mouse in the photo editing package GIMP 2.0. The textured paper background was added by layering the coloured image over an existing textured stock image and creating a transparent colour. The kind of guiding principle was a loose theme of 'day and night', to carry on the festival vibe, so the text on the left hand side has a blue through green colour scheme, surrounding a cartoon sun, and the text on the right ran through red and purple tones around a cartoon moon. Little details like the block capital text and stars were included to keep it from straying too far towards childlike, and mirrored the Haight-Ashbury style posters I was referencing.
The invitations themselves were a bit of an excuse to experiment, to push the theme of the Save The Dates a little further and create something totally unique. It was also a way to introduce some physical artwork which I hoped to carry over in to the wedding itself. I bought a large roll of craft paper (carrying over from the textured paper backdrop of the Save The Dates) and drew out another cartoony art nouveau style arch frame, this time filling the rest of the page with a slightly acid-inspired sunflower motif (another request from the bride). The arches and sunflowers were all drawn with chalk pastels, on a large scale, then photographed and resized for the A5 invites. The idea being that for things like the running orders or direction signs for the big day, I would be able to inexpensively create them on the spot with similar design work and there would be a thematic visual link throughout.
The next task was to create, in ink on bristol board, the names of the bride & groom in a hand drawn hippy-esque font. Once this was photographed and posterized, I used an abstract pastel drawing of an evening sky (which I had tweaked to make as vibrant and dramatic as possible) and created a clipping mask to use that as the fill image for the text. Once I had that, I created another transparency and pasted that over the chalk-drawn poster. I used the petals and corollae of the sunflowers to paste text for the date of the wedding, which was coloured to match the overall design that was emerging. This poster was then superimposed on to a brick wall, just to differentiate it from the Save The Dates a little more and to make it seem a little rougher, like a real gig/event poster.
Next we needed something to put on the front of the service order for the church. While still wanting to continue the themes we had developed, I needed to be a bit more restrained so took a completely different approach. I went to the church and took a lot of reference photos. From these, I picked one which showed the church from the perspective of the duck pond just opposite, nestled amongst the trees there. I created two different pastel images; one a very traditional, slightly naive landscape drawing in daylight, the other a more abstract image in sunset tones of red, pink, purple etc. (to continue the day to night theme). I created a clipping mask using the bride and groom's names and used the bold colours of the abstract image to make the text visible over the landscape image without having to use outlines. I added a very simple line of white text for the date of the wedding.
Last, but not least, I was asked to come up with a bold, simple portrait of the couple to display. Now, this went through a LOT of various iterations, from superheroes to Simpsons characters, before the bride's love of cats won the day. My idea for this image was to create a kind of a spoof on Royal Wedding memorabilia, those odd tea towels and mugs that sit threadbare or coffee stained in your royalist aunt's cupboards. Instead of a stiff portrait of young bluebloods, we used cartoon cats in wedding attire. The rest of the design was created very much on a first draft, just an evening of sitting and seeing what came out in terms of freehand font design and creating a fussy, self-consciously gaudy border design. My plan was to keep the lines bold enough that it could be a tattoo design or something from a vintage zine, which was my way of keeping it from becoming too saccharine and losing the comic effect of the absurdity of the image. This image was framed and took up residence first next to the wedding cake display, and later in the day next to the wedding guest book. Copies were printed up and used in the running order and table plan, and some have been given as gifts.
The text was then isolated using GIMP and resized to use as a header on the wedding menus. The menu was simply a Word doc made using a custom font downloaded from Font Squirrel called Inknut Antiqua. I loved it's slightly irreverent, off-kilter take on a formal font, it seemed to capture the tone we were looking for, and it was in fact a holdover from the church order of service cover design. They were printed on to thick, off-white paper so they could be propped up on miniature easels on the dinner tables.
I loved having the opportunity to be so involved in their big day, and to be able to work on one project over a long time and develop ideas and themes that could develop. It was also a great excuse to learn a few new techniques, get some practice in old techniques, and collaborate with a 'client' safe in the knowledge that we could be honest with each other when things didn't work and be given reign to experiment on my own terms while still aiming to give them what they wanted.
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