My creative RSVP...

For my friend Angela's wedding RSVPs, we were asked to decorate the back of the postcard with whatever you wanted. They said the most creative would get posted at the wedding.

So that became my goal and I ended up sending in the RSVP 5 days late because I wanted to take the time to draw something fun. I know, I know, as a bride-to-be planning her wedding and reading lots of wedding blogs, I know that a late RSVP is one of the most frustrating things to deal with. However, she did ask for creative postcards...

I'm not a great illustrator, but I pencil and letter stuff pretty well. I'm also a huge fan of comic books and I like the sort of descriptive, wordy, stick-figure style of creating comics. I've done this before.

So I decided to do something similar and incorporate the story of how they met (from their wedding website). I used pencil first to create the blocks of space and then penciled in the stick figures and the dialogue. Then I went over each section with a black fine-fine-tipped pen (I got these 0.3MM pens from China that smell like fruity markers and don't skip).

After each section was inked and left to dry, I went back with an eraser and got rid of all the pencil marks. That's actually my favorite part of drawing or lettering. I love seeing all the blurry pencil marks start to disappear. Then you blow on the paper to remove the eraser shavings and the picture becomes all clear and perfect.

Then I went back and colored in some of the drawings to make the images pop. I think adding just a bit of color makes it even more cheerful and stand out more versus filling the whole page with color.

Anyways, if you do actually enlarge the image... they met online via friends, met in person at a Halloween party (he was Kobayashi the hot-dog eating champion and she was a cat) and he proposed at the next Halloween (they were a Chinese emperor and empress).