Wedding Tree Guestbook

This weekend two of our friends from college tied the knot. The wedding was at the Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore and every detail of their wedding was as creatively planned out as their venue. It was incredibly personalized and impressive. And I wish I had 1) explored the museum and 2) taken more pictures. I was not on my game.

Instead of a traditional guestbook, the couple wanted their guests to fingerprint a tree. I love this idea! Yet another reason why I'm sad Pinterest was not around when I got married.  Etsy has a number of artists selling these tree guestbooks. Lots of variations on this idea. You can even ask your guests to fingerprint balloons. People are so clever.

When I was asked if I could draw a tree for this I, of course, said yes. I didn't guarantee it would be awesome. But I would definitely try it. This was my first serious ink/marker drawing and I was slightly nervous. Ink is so... permanent. You can't erase or paint over mess-ups. Mess-ups require starting over.

After getting over my fear of failure, this ended up being a fun little project. Naturally, I first lightly sketched things out with (erasable) pencil to make sure I liked where I was headed. I did a lot of Googling for images of trees. Since Hurricane Sandy gave me the gift of time I was able to finish this rather quickly. In a matter of days! That almost never happens.

This was my sneak peak during the hurricane...

I was able to finish just before the winds got scary that night and before the heavy light flickering. I was pleased with the results.

Luckily my friends were also pleased and my drawing made it to the wedding. I even got to see it in action.

I particularly like how people made sure to space out their prints appropriately. Well done people. Well done.

It was awesome to have been able to contribute something to this special wedding. I celebrated by having another glass of wine and making my way to the dance floor.

Congrats again to the newlyweds!

Merry Christmas to Me

I finally got around to ordering my wedding collage canvas that I started back in November. Since I was ordering Christmas cards, it seemed like a good time to do a massive Shutterfly order.

Here it is. All 24x36 inches of it.

And a close up.

And hanging on our photo wall.

It's definitely large.

As for that Christmas card. Here's that. Although most people reading this have already seen it. Hi Mom :)

I'm certain people would rather see Meatball over Mike and I. And no, he is not actually wearing this hat. Lately I've been turning to Photoshop instead of props. Meatball would never sleep this peacefully with something on his head.

Party People

Back here I mentioned wanting to do something with all of the pictures I made for our wedding favors. 

So here it is.

Can you read me? No?

They look like a small army. Also looks like wrapping paper. But that's okay. I plan to print to canvas and hang. A LARGE canvas so that you can somewhat distinguish the people. And the words. By the way, those words are our wedding invitation.

I ended up with a perfect square. But I am certain that I lost some people along the way. My record-keeping skills are not quite what I thought they were.

Next up is a wedding album!

Possibly My Greatest Accomplishment Ever...

....my wedding favors. Yes, that's right. This is going to look crazy for a second, but this is everyone who came to our wedding:




These photos were taken in haste the day before our wedding. As were individual portraits of each.

Like this.

 

And this.

And this.

Actually, THESE portraits have been cropped. So there is no carpet background or occasional limb of mine.

This is me taking 120+  pictures in haste.

I really disliked wedding planning. But these personalized wedding favors were something I knew I wanted to do from early on. And so starting sometime in January (for our August wedding), I tracked down pictures of all of our guests and got to work. The generic male/female bodies made things a bit easier. What I worried about most was offending someone with their portrait. Of course, there were also a few people who I had never met in person. I totally relied on their photo being an accurate representation of themselves.

So I'm on a mission now to crop all of the individual pictures and make some sort of "cool" collage. (Better than what was slapped together above.) One of those photo collages that look like a picture of something from far away would be awesome. Not that I know how to do that.

A Wedding Gift

Completed 2011

11"x14"

Oil

My most recently completed painting is this one; a wedding gift for one of my best and oldest friends. Thanks to Facebook, I was able to snag their silhouettes off of one of their wedding pictures.