Rebecca Engelberg & Matthew Witcher Wedding Invites: Part 1

Wow, three and a half months without a post on this blog?!  I've drawn lots of illustrations in that time, I just haven't had the time to post them!  I'm going to try and get caught up with my posting during these last few weeks of 2010, so that I end up with more than the pathetic 11 posts I had last year.

This week I'll be talking about some wedding invitations that I made for my oldest family friends, the Engelbergs.  Their daughter Rebecca asked me to design the invitations for her and her fiance (now husband) Matthew.  Rebecca sent me a lot of ideas from various wedding magazines and websites, but said this was her favorite:

UPDATE: I finally found out this beautiful invitation was designed by Anna Bond who makes custom wedding invitations at Rifle Paper Co.  She also has an awesome design blog - go check out her work!

I always feel weird when clients ask me to base an illustration off of another, but it does save me a lot of time, and in the end, I always change enough, that I'm using the original piece as inspiration more than just copying it.  But it still doesn't feel quite right...  Anyway, here's the sketch that I sent to Rebecca and Matthew:

Rebecca and Matt were married in Hawaii, so I added a beach with a palm tree, Diamond Head in the background and instead of animals, I changed it to a single heart constellation.  The initial design was 2-color (blue and black) but Rebecca and Matt decided they wanted the design to be in full color, so they could incorporate some orange, which was the wedding color.  Here's the final design, which you can click to make bigger:

Next week I'll show some of the other invitations that I designed for this wedding!