Making Save the Dates for Alan and Alanah

How to make bespoke save the dates:

To start of this bespoke wedding stationery suite Alan, Alanah and I had a zoom call to have a big chat about their wedding, their venue, and their vision for their bespoke stationery and save the dates! We discussed the beautiful venue in Northumberland which had a forest on site that they are going to have photos taken in and how that might be incorporated into their save the dates.

Then I went away and came up with an initial rough sketch. I like to do my rough sketches in procreate on my iPad because it is very easy to rub things out and move things around to get different ideas of a layout that would be a bit more fiddly if I was sketching by hand. Alanah sent me through some reference photos of them walking so I can could get little things like their height difference and clothes just right.

Then once I was happy with the layout and what I needed to draw I sat down to do my pencil sketch. This is actually the bit I find the most frustrating, sometimes I have to rub it out so many times to get it just right.

Then came the fun part! Painting! I spent time using my watercolours to add in the forest colours. I used a reference photo I already had in my sketchbook of trees that I loved to copy the same style. Then once it had all dried I added in the pencil details to bring it all together. I made sure I left enough white space to fit all the text I knew I needed to add digitally.

Then I scanned in the illustration, digitally removed the white paper background in Affinity Photo and made sure the colours more closely resembled the original painting. I sent a few different versions of the font and composition to Alan and Alanah to get their final approval and then we sent it off to the printers! Alanah chose a dark green envelope and then they went out to the guests.

Excitingly, as I am going to this wedding I got to receive my very own save the date in the post and I am so happy with how these turned out! I am excited to start work on their wedding invites and other stationery bits!!

If you'd like to work with me on something special that exactly matches you and your partner - please do get in touch, I genuinely love doing this for couples and making sure I get all the little details right!