Weddingbee Blog

When I was a little girl I was obsessed with the Funk and Wagnalls science encyclopedias available in our supermarket. The first volume covering A-Aq sold for only 9 cents so it was easy to talk my mother into buying a copy. For months, it was my most prized possession and I read from ‘aardvark’ to ‘aquarium’ savoring each entry. By far, my favorite entry was ‘animal’. It contained a massive taxonomy tree covering two pages. I studied the chart like it was for a grade.

Once we decided on a zoo reception venue, the chart sprang to mind as a convenient, organized way to incorporate and expand our animal theme. I drew many of the animal/plant/monera kingdom illustrations myself, though I nipped a few (namely the horse, butterfly and frog) from one of my copyright free illustration books and converted them to silhouettes.

The digital design layout:

In order to print multiple colors we broke down our digital illustration and converted each layer to a simple black and white image. Here are our results; we printed each on a transparency in order to burn them on to a screen:

Screen printing the illustrations turned out to be time consuming. The green background took more than the usual amount of time because I wanted the color to go all the way up to the edges, so when we placed each card we needed to add scraps around the edges to keep the ink from smearing onto the back of the screen and smudging future copies. Doing this 200+ times really adds up.

In addition, the tiny animal/plant/etc. illustrations lost details when we added more ink than needed. Therefore, we had to print reeeeally slowly and blot the screen at the first sign of trouble. Thanks goodness for the patience of our friends.

We also had a fourth layer of ink, the dotted swirls in the illustration above, but I couldn’t decide whether I liked the extra embellishment so only half of our invitations carry it.

If you really want to learn to screen print check out this tutorial.