Southwest Watercolor Cactus Wedding Invitations | Styled Shoot
Category: Portfolio | Published on: Jan 27, 2017
A few months ago, the amazing Lisa from Creative Concepts by Lisa reached out to me about doing a western styled shoot, and I jumped at the chance to create some amazing cactus wedding invitations!
Inspiration
With a theme like “western” it’s easy to get caught up in being cliche. I definitely wanted to show off my creativity, so I came up with a design idea that was unique and yet fit the theme perfectly.
One of my favorite artists is Georgia O’Keeffe, and if you haven’t seen her paintings of the New Mexico landscape, you should check them out! She really captured the warmth and vastness of the land, and I wanted to do the same.
Creating the Art
I set to work painting my own Southwestern landscape, and a couple of extra cacti for other decorative elements.
The Finished Painting
Who doesn’t love these mini cacti paintings?!
Designing the Cactus Wedding Invitations
One of the more challenging parts of this design was the font choices. I wanted something that evoked the old west, but that didn’t scream it.
At one point, you probably owned a font named GiddyUp, which looks like lassos. It comes pre-installed on a lot of computers. So… I wanted to avoid anything like it!
I narrowed down the elements I wanted out of my font choice, such as a thick line and looping strokes. After hours spend browsing font families, I found an amazing font with beautiful loop ligatures. It wasn’t western on its own, but when paired with the landscape and cactus it fit right in. Bingo!
Lisa let me figure out the text to go on it, so I really rounded up the cowboy language. 😉
Embellishments
I focused the color palette on bright yellows, greens, and blues. These colors are in the painted elements and I really punched up the brightness by selecting a green pocket, yellow belly band, and a turquoise envelope liner.
All the items were printed on cream paper, so there wasn’t any white anywhere. Perfect for keeping a consistent warmth throughout this entire cactus wedding invitation suite!
The Shoot
This was one shoot I was actually able to attend, and it was awesome! It was amazing to see how my designs felt with the whole event. Check out how everything pulled together for the Wild West Wedding, featured in the Spring 2017 issue of Connecticut Bride!
Want your own custom painted wedding invitations? Contact me!
P.S. Did you spy that amazing watercolor map of Connecticut?! I’ll show you how I created it in the near future…
— Ashleigh
See more posts about: cactus invitations, country wedding, cowboy wedding, invitation, invitation inspirations, invitations, painted, painting, southwest wedding, watercolor process, watercolor wedding invitations
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