As many of you know, next week I fly to the Arctic to marry my best friend, love of my life, and fellow illustrator Daniel Lecky. We'll be traveling to northern Norway and hiking through the Lofoten Islands, which somehow seemed a fitting wedding adventure after getting engaged in the German Alps overlooking Schloss Neuschwanstein.

To be perfectly frank, I have hated wedding planning. Planning trips? Great! Planning weddings? Not so much. But there has been one piece that Daniel and I have really enjoyed working on together: the paper goods!

Since we're both professional artists, we had a lot of ideas about how we wanted our invitations, save-the-dates, etc. to look, and how we could best collaborate on them.

We designed our save-the-dates pretty soon after getting engaged (well before we knew what sort of style we wanted for the wedding), and so tried to have them really reflect our personalities: kids at heart who love adventuring together outdoors. We both grew up with Calvin & Hobbes, and love it just as much now as we did then, so it seemed a natural choice of style. Plus, the comic setup let us tell more of a story, which we really liked. Daniel did all of the sketching and inking, while I did the painting/color. It was a fun experiment, trying to copy someone else's watercolor style like that! Most of all though, we enjoyed getting to work together on a project, which, having such different styles and types of work, is a rare occurrence.

For our invitations, I wanted to do some kind of papercutting, while still involving Daniel's sleek design sensibilities. Our original wedding venue was a gorgeously restored 1920s Art Deco building, so as you can see, we drew heavily on that glamorous Deco style for our invites. And while the venue unfortunately went out of business 5 months before our wedding (giving us some major panic and forcing very hasty replanning!), we still liked the look of the sumptuous fur and classy tuxedo, and decided to use the design anyway, just replacing the background.

And of course, our cat, Arthur, wanted to be included too, so we set him to work guarding the RSVPs.

While I know that a lot of people try to have all their paper goods coordinate in design, we decided just to have fun with it and do a little bit of everything. Also, since we've both been working our normal jobs throughout the entire process, we only had time for so much. All in all, we had fun with it and had fun doing it together, which at the end of the day, is what matters most.

I'll post another update soon about my coming name change/rebranding, so stay tuned!