Memorial Day turned out to be very busy for me and my family, so this site update is a day late. First, I have to wish my memere a very happy 94th birthday! I miss you, and here’s to 94 more!
Secondly, an equally Happy First Anniversary to my cousin and his lovely wife. Sometime in 2013, they approached me and asked if I’d be willing to help them design their wedding invitations. Family is my top priority, so of course I said “yes”. The water has big significance in their individual and shared lives, so they really wanted a nautical theme to the invitations (as well as their overall wedding). So, I started hunting for reference pictures and scribbling down notes and ideas until we finally arrived at what is posted here. They needed a save-the-date card, a response card with a self-addressed side, an information card with directions, and of course the invitation itself.
The black and white save-the-date card.
The color version with a “sunset” color palette. These were printed out business card size.
Obviously the blurred bits are where I had to obscure text…to protect the innocent…or something…
The response card, minus the text. They had me do 2 versions of this: one with “normal” writing, asking about who was attending and meal selection, and a version that was written in “pirate speak” with lot’s of “ye” and “arrrr” type language. I preferred the pirate speak, but it probably would have confused some family members…
The self addressed side of the response card.
I created all these at the beginning-ish of my digital drawing transition. At the time, I was still using GIMP, which is a fine piece of software, especially because it’s free. However, I did convert to the industry standard, Photoshop, a little while ago as it’s a bit more powerful and a bit less prone to problems. Somewhere along the lines my “tech department” (i.e. my lovely wife) rebuilt my machine and we got rid of GIMP. As such, I lost the ability to open the layered versions of my GIMP files that I didn’t already save in a PSD format, hence I resorted to blurring out most of the text rather than turning off the layers.
The information card…redacted…
It was a bit of work, but it was fun and a good learning process, and I’m relatively pleased with the results (I’m assuming they were too, since they mailed them out to everyone). But, me being me, I had a bit of hidden fun with these. Each image has at least one squid in it, how many can you find? Now that everyone’s had a year to look (and I’m sure everyone that received one has been tirelessly pouring over each image of the invitation package), I think I can safely show the answers below…
I hope I didn’t need to point out the one attacking the ship…
I hope the “cloud squid” was another easy one to find…
Just one in this image.
The last one.
Be honest, who found them all?
Once again, happy birthday memere and happy anniversary Brandon and Gabby!
Please let me know what you think, it makes my brain happy.