Venue illustrations can add such a gorgeous and luxurious touch to your wedding invitations and are an exciting indication of things to come. With more and more couples choosing to make their wedding invitations super personalised, it’s a wonderful extra detail that you can add. It’s also perfectly suited to the letterpress process as elegant line drawings add a wonderful, slightly 3D element when pressed. Here’s how I create your custom venue illustrations for your luxury wedding invitations.

Find good quality source materials

It’s no good recreating your venue from grainy or poorly shot photos! If you are due to have a venue visit, it is incredibly helpful if you can take photographs of your venue from a few angles, if this isn’t possible, I will scour the internet for good quality images and confirm with you which ones you’d like me to use.

Transform your venue into a gorgeous illustration

I create my venue illustrations on an iPad Pro using Procreate as this gives me more control over the quality of the lines when I vectorise the illustration (more on that later!). It also means I can make sure it is absolutely perfect as I can tweak and change until it is just right.

Brand Photography: The Woman and The Wolf

Prep the artwork for letterpress

Next, I transfer the artwork from my iPad to my iMac and load it into Adobe Illustrator. All letterpress designs need to be created in Adobe Illustrator as vector-based artwork is required for the printing plates. I’ll turn the venue illustration into a vector using the Live Trace tool, and then tweak it until I am happy with the end result. Next, I take the image and incorporate it into your invitation design.

Hand printed with love

Once the design is approved, I get the plates made up and set to work pressing your luxury letterpress invitations on my 1950’s Vicobold printing press.

Illustration is such a wonderful special touch to add to your letterpress wedding invitations, they elevate the designs from other invitations and sets the scene for your wedding day. I illustrate by hand and use Procreate and Adobe Illustrator to incorporate these unique wedding venue drawings into your luxury wedding stationery.