Mad Thoughts

getmarried:

We’ve been overwhelemed by the compliments and kudos our wedding invites have received. Thank you all for enjoying them so much!

There isn’t much of a story behind the invite. Shannon and I have a geeky bone (or two, or three) in our bodies, but we aren’t planning a very geeky wedding. We decided we should show that side of ourselves in the invite.

Off to the internet! Shannon did some searching, and found a man on Etsy.com that couples like us can commission to produce artwork for us. She realized this was the same person featured in an article sent to her by our friend Lindsay. We loved the sample artwork he provided and his overall style. We reached out to him, sent him some ideas we had about the landscape and what type of peril the invitation version of us would face. We decided to ground ourselves in a post-apocalyptic cityscape (there’s no place like home) and face-off against the greatest threat we could imagine: our cat Jack!

The artist was excited about our project and was ready to flex his artistic muscles. We sent him some headshots of us and Jack, and a few weeks later, got a huge black and white pencil of the artwork, and the digital, color image files that would make the invite.

We were ecstatic. I wanted to send them right away, but the advice of friends convinced me to wait for the proper times. Its been tough to keep the secret and to not blow the surprise coming to people’s mailboxes. The wait, however, was worth it and we’ve been delighted to hear all of the positive feedback.

The artist goes by the name swelser on Etsy and was an absolute pleasure to work with. Responsive and attentive, he met all of his deadlines and produced a piece of artwork that we’ll look back and love for a long, long time. If this is your sort of thing, I can’t recommend the guy enough. Plan way in advance though— swelser was recently featured on the uber-geek blog, i09.

We are likely going to get a little more use out of the artwork. There will liekly be a large print of the cover for show at the wedding and we’ll be reusing the little Jason and Shannon heads in some other places too.