Recently my best friend got married. It was a day of incredible joy, love and laughter. It was also, for me, a joyous exercise in lending my designing hands to my friend’s special day.

The bride had found an example of an illustrated guide to a bridal party on Pinterest, and asked if I could replicate the idea by illustrating each member of the bridal party so that guests knew who had been asked to stand with them at the altar. It was a big task, but one I had SO much fun with! Here’s the finished jpeg:

And here’s how I made it! First I started by tracing the main attributes of the party in Illustrator with the pen tool. After the basics were there, I drew the rest of the features in. All the girls got extra eyelashes, cause, well, society. Here’s examples of Kristin, the maid of honour, and Eva, one of her bridesmaids.

Once all the people had been drawn in Illustrator, I saved the file as a pdf and transferred it into Photoshop.

I then created two more layers – one for skin and one for hair. Within each later, I set the brush tool to low opacities (17% – 32%) so that I could airbrush on their skin and hair colour, and build them up layer by layer. This was, understandably, quite a timely task, but a really fun one – especially when it came to airbrushing the make up on to the women!

Here’s the finished faces for the groomsmen and bridesmaids.

Then, they were saved and put into InDesign, where I added the paragraphs and designed the full page to match the colours and style of the Bride and Groom’s invites. Here’s some photos of how they printed out and looked on the day!

And yup that’s me at the bottom! I’m so glad my buddy asked me to get involved, and uh if anyone’s interested in anything similar – do get in touch! I’m also available for Bat Mitzvahs.

@makingthemarrow