creating a little piece of art

now, that everyone has received his/her invitation, i can talk about them!

my beautiful friend and maid of honor, amanda, is a wonderfully talented artist who deals with a lot of different medias, including printmaking. when i started thinking about invitations, i realized how special it would be if they were small pieces of art designed and created by a great artist and my best friend. they would mean much more to me than if we had just found some online and ordered them from a stranger. lucky for us, amanda agreed and was kind enough to give up a few days of her time to make them.

amanda decided that screenprinting was the best option. screenprinting is a printmaking technique that creates a sharp-edged image using a stencil. the first thing you have to do is get paper. it comes in huge sheets that you then have to rip down to the size you want your paper to be.





something i found in the art building that i found amusing given the huge task at hand...


next you have to have a design which we didn't have going into it. i searched through magazines and books while amanda ripped the paper. then manda sketched and played around with ideas. at the end of day 1 we had paper the size we wanted but no final design.

we finally decided on a design we loved. next manda had to transfer it to the special red transparent paper that is used to create the screen or stencil. each color you want on your print has to be a different screen, so we did several. next, you need to chose your colors & in our case, we had to mix them which took some trial and error. we decided on a color for the background and started that run.

to actually print, you attach your screen to a sort of arm that lets you raise and lower it. you put your piece of paper on the table and line it up with the stencil on your screen. you pull paint across the screen which is called flooding the screen, lower the screen flat to the table, and then pull the paint across again. that final pull is when the paint actually goes onto the paper. this is done to each piece of paper individually & we did 120 prints...with 6 different colors...that's a lot of flooding...



after each run, you have to let the prints dry before you can start the next. here they are drying.


combine the paper ripping, designing, paint mixing, and drying time with the fact that each invite has to be touched 6 times meant a lot of time was spent in the print shop. we were there for 4 days. the final day, we were there for over 12 hours. but it was all worth it when we saw the final product.


we put a backing on the invites once they were finished. although the recipient doesn't realize it, almost every backing was different along with each print being slightly different.


i LOVE how they turned out. i love them all together with the backing and the envelope. i love that each one is individual and is a piece of art. i love that amanda loved me and danny enough to give up an entire weekend to create these. hope you love them too. :)