Continuing The Adventure: Our Wedding Invitation

First of all, I just want to say that I'm sorry for being such a slacker with posting on my art blog.  I know there are very few passable excuses, but for over the past year I've been planning my wedding!  And it's taking place in a month from today. A. Month. From. Today!  I don't know if I can grasp it!  My fiancé, Daniel Skubal, and I have been working on lots and lots of our own art for our wedding.  This has been happening along with our 9 to 5 jobs and freelance projects.  It has been an extremely busy last couple months to say the least. 

Our invitation project is, by far, my favorite artwork we have done for the wedding.  We are going for an old Hollywood theme, so naturally we wanted to make an old 1940's movie poster.  Dan is a filmmaker and has an obsession with the art deco era.  And I love all things vintage!  So this was a perfect idea for the two of us.  We're also making a large poster for the lobby at our wedding reception with a "Now Playing" banner in the corner.  The tables will have theater numbers on them, and the place cards are movie tickets.  Here is our invitation and poster!

We have done some collaborations before, but this was something we both put our hearts and souls into.  Dan and I started off by doing a fun retro photo shoot of ourselves in our apartment.  We just used my camera, set it up with the tripod, and snapped away.  It was actually a really fun time!  After we captured the pose we liked best for an iconic romantic movie poster, I sketched us out and put the outline on my computer.  From there, I painted us with my Wacom on Photoshop.  This was a process with close to a billion layers of color.  Haha... I was really happy with how it turned out in the end.  I'm really starting to enjoy digital painting; something I completely rejected when I was in the illustration program at NIU. 

After I made the full digital painting of us, I went on to do the same with the sky and the red plane.  Daniel was dead-set on having the title as skywriting.  I was worried it would not turn out the way we wanted, and this was actually more frustrating than I had anticipated.  But, I'm happy with the result after all of the skywriting versions I worked on.  Once all my painting was done, Daniel worked his magic. 

He added the Chicago skyline to the background, adjusted some color, added texture to the whole piece to give it that old feel, and of course, did some amazing typography.  If you look at the credits in our movie poster, it is actually the names of our friends and family in the wedding party! 

We're hoping that this piece can be added to our collaborative portfolio, and are also planning a bunch more projects. 

It's rare when you can find someone who has the same artistic vision as you and trust him to change and work on a piece with you.  It's even more rare when it is the person who you are going to marry.  I'm so lucky to have found both of these things in Daniel!  I'm excited to see what our future holds.  Not just in our marriage, but in our art and design work.