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Mrs. Lollipop, Pittsburgh Age and Occupation: 26, Computational Linguist Fiance's Age and Occupation: 26, Project Manager Engagement Date: August 2, 2006 Wedding Date: September 2, 2007 Blogging Since: July 17, 2007 Venue: The PPG Aquarium at the Pittsburgh Zoo About Me: I'm a Pittsburgh transplant who grew up in the deep south. I have a weakness for exotic alphabets, DIY projects, mobster movies and international travel. My fiance and I are both non-native Japanese speakers and we have a bullfrog named Skinny.
About Mrs. Lollipop

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.

IMG_19903

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:

invitat

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:

invitat011.jpg

invitat021.jpg

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.

Tags: , , |   Link for this post | Share this post: Invitation Inspiration: The Cover Design      
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10 Responses to “Invitation Inspiration: The Cover Design”

1.
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Tanya

Cute! Heh– is that a hamburger in your chart next to the crab? ;)

 
2.
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em

SUPER CUTE!! Screen printing is a very tedious process… but the results are beautiful :)

 
3.
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Linda

those are really funky! I love it!

 
4.
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aoedorothee

hahah, i didn’t even notice the hamburger!

 
5.
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bride of rochester

i love them. fantastic and infinitely original. Nice one celled organisms in the upper left hand corner!

 
6.
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bunnybride

I LOVE YOUR GRAPHIC!!! I’m into a bit of the biology and love what you have going on there. Thanks for the silkscreen link as well.

 
7.
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CJ

Those are definitely cool; I’m impressed by your commitment to the project.

 
8.
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Miss Lollipop

I couldn’t think of anything for Kingdom Protista so I drew a hamburger. :-)

 
9.
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bunnybride

Dude, the hamburger for protozoans is totally EWWWW, and hilarious!

 


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Mrs. Lollipop Mrs. Lollipop, Pittsburgh Age and Occupation: 26, Computational Linguist Fiance's Age and Occupation: 26, Project Manager Engagement Date: August 2, 2006 Wedding Date: September 2, 2007 Blogging Since: July 17, 2007 Venue: The PPG Aquarium at the Pittsburgh Zoo About Me: I'm a Pittsburgh transplant who grew up in the deep south. I have a weakness for exotic alphabets, DIY projects, mobster movies and international travel. My fiance and I are both non-native Japanese speakers and we have a bullfrog named Skinny.
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