The tears being tears of joy that we actually finished these babies!  We’ve received a few emails from friends & family asking us how we created our wedding invites, so we decided to do a little (and by little, I mean long) post on it.  Read on below:

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Hear Ye, Hear Ye!  It’s summer SALE time!

In an effort to clean out my Etsy shop by the end of summer (need to make room for new Fall and Holiday items!), I’m having a summer sale on all drawings and paintings.  Since I’m getting married mid-August, I’d like to try and have things cleaned out by the end of July.  Here are some of the details:

**All original drawings, now $35 or 3/$90

**All paintings $50-150 off original price

click image for Etsy

My brother and future sis-in-law are getting married this year on Halloween and are celebrating by having a costume party reception.  I can’t wait!  I’m doing a few drawings for their invites, which I won’t put up on here until they’re all sent out (don’t want to ruin the surprise!), but I will put up an initial sketch I did for the save-the-date.

My tribute to RJD, via Twaggies.  Click to view larger.

Since Wes and I aren’t exactly web pros, we needed to keep our wedding site pretty basic (which is fine since all it needs to do is provide info).  We also tried to make it easy to navigate, with simple categories that were pretty self-explanatory.

After coming up with the animation, I drew up a sign post, painted the color separately, and then placed the drawing on top of it.  Below is a still from our homepage (click for larger image).

If you’d still like to view the actual site (dull details & all), feel free to click here.

So I’ve received quite a few emails asking me about the site that Wes and I created for our wedding (thank-you btw, they’ve all been really sweet!).  We’re still updating it as we go along, and I don’t want to bore you with all of the details, so I’ll just post a few elements from it.

We initially looked at a few of the hundreds of free sites out there (which are great and easy to use) but we really didn’t like any of the designs we found.  So we decided to put together our own site that had a more hand made feel to it, and carried the theme of our save-the-date cards.

I started by sketching the two of us on our Vespa (Bruce in back), then painted the color separately, followed by overlaying the drawing on top of it.  We wanted to animate the bike, so I then redrew a couple more frames and decided to change the pom-poms to tin cans, to give it more of a country feel.  Stay tuned for more!

Vespa riders for the homepage (click for detail)

a little snippet from the animated version

A few new gals up over at Twaggies.   To get twagged by me, follow them on Twitter HERE and say silly things.

August seems to be quickly approaching, which is kind of a good thing b/c planning a small out-of-state shindig has proved harder than we originally thought it would be.  Wes & I decided on sending out simple 6in x 6in postcards that had a bit of folk art feel to them.

I sketched up an image that included both our home states and the tiny church we’ll be married in.  I then painted the color separately and layered them together to give a slightly silk-screened effect.  We then built our own site (more on that later) and will be letterpressing our own invites with our brand-new (but old) letterpress.

the sketch below:

New guy up at Twaggies, ladies & gents.  I’m going to be doodling for them 3-5 times a week, so check back often!  Or you can follow them on Twitter HERE.

So I may be doing some doodles of other people’s tweets for Twaggies.  If you say something stupid or funny, I may just end up drawing it.

To receive Twaggie updates, follow me @K_Essenpreis or @Twaggies

A couple more drawings went up for sale today HERE.

purchase HERE