Handmade Birthday Invitations

It's my birthday. Soon.

Naturally researching the perfect earl grey cupcake with lavender buttercream we have tea.

Thank you Pinecone dream for making such lovely wallpapers. And super thanks to The Bakers Almanac for the recipe I ultimately landed on. I'll give my thoughts on the cupcakes later on.

The tea set was a gift from my mother. I grew up with my grandmother's tea set from Austria, while ultimately inheriting the set - and absolutely lovely - it never felt like me. So now, two moves later, my "Belleek" tea set is keeping me company.

I've always enjoyed celebrating my birthday. When I turned 30, my dear husband threw me an "emergency" surprise party - 3 weeks before my birthday he asked what I wanted and I said a surprise party. It was amazing! Thank you to my favorite Slytherin and her Hufflepuff for helping my Hufflepuff make this party magical.

Then COVID put most of the North East into lockdown (not quite UK style but in April of 2020 it was pretty close) and I was reduced to tormenting my dear husband at 6am before he left for work - I was still out of a job by that time.

This year, I'm looking at celebrating but knowing we are still under a mask mandate and all of the social restrictions are in place. So I'm grabbing a few of my closest vaccinated friends, opening all the windows, and celebrating - Thank goodness it's set to be 65 and sunny.

I probably found the most elaborate way to make a few invitations. Watercolors, markers, glue, a special hole punch, a special pen, and many prototypes later I landed on these. Oh yes, to the meat of the post several tangents later - how to make the invitations.

Materials:

Blank Card and Envelope: I used a thicker cream-colored one - for one very specific reason, it was on sale.

Tombow dual brush pens, or any other waterbased ink marker

Blending palette a.k.a. laminated card stock

Watercolor pencils

Farber-Castell gelatos

Hole punch (5/8" and 1")

Waterbrush

Flat brush

Mister - I'll get into this one briefly.

Washi-Tape or masking tape

Glue dots or glue

Pens:

Pentel Sign Pen in purple

Artist's Loft calligraphy marker medium in gold

Random purple, gold, and black fine-tip markers or pens.

Step 1: Make the dots

Starting with the watercolor dots to be glued onto the card. I laid another blank card down - taped it with washi tape (painter's tape would have worked just as well). Then using the blending pallet I colored on it with the Tombow pens, this gives you the "paint" you are going to work with. 

Using the mister I sprayed the card evenly until the card was damp - no puddles and sprayed the blending pallet with the marker. This gets us to a "wet on wet" painting experience which I absolutely love for abstract watercolor scenes or if you want to "paint with all the colors of the wind", it's fun.

Note on the mister. The little mister came with a Tombow beginner watercolor set. It's a mini spray bottle.

At this point I went to town with the wet on wet watercolor, towards the end I added the gelato to the blending palette. The gelato, is not ice cream, in this case, it's a creamy ink crayon. You can use it dry on a dry piece of paper, or as I was playing around with it - wet on wet. I was able to get some of the glitters out and give the whole piece more of a shimmer and shine. Use your flat brush or whatever brush you wish, and paint away.

Let it dry...... really really dry. Hole punches don't like soggy paper.

Lastly, take your hole punch and cut all the circles you may need.

Step 1 1/2: punch out more circles

Step 2: Planning the front of the card

Using the cut-out dots, I traced out where I wanted the cutouts, watercolor dots to be glued, and ultimately where the on-card watercolor dots would be.

This step took much longer than it needed to because I also forgot in the first round to accommodate the lettering.

Step 3: Water Color Pencil Dots

Waterbrushes are my favorite

These were fun. I played around with what worked and what didn't and found for my purposes a few things

• A dull pencil tip gives you a lighter shade, which is great. Colors build up quickly when you use layers of shading (see the blue dot below)
• Wetting the paper then coloring tends to leave less of a watercolor effect and more of a creamy pencil look. Not terrible but not what I was looking for.
• Dry pencil then using a water brush gives you a watercolor look (see the orange dot below)

Left is just pencil, Right is after using the water brush.

The water brush is a brush that has a water "tank" built-in, it allows you to control the amount of water you are using if you want very little.

Essentially, watercolor pencils and a water brush are excellent travel watercolor supplies or beginner supplies - very low mess in terms of storage and travel and it helps support learning the basics of color theory which I found to be exceptionally helpful when utilizing watercolor paints - because honestly with red, yellow, blue, black, and white you really can make any color you want but that takes time and practice. Watercolor pencils, in my mind, give you a nice little stepping stone into that colorful world.

Let dry.

Step 4: Some assembly required

Now you have your dots - all of them. With your glue of choice adhere the dots to the card.

Step 5: Inside watercolor

For the card, I wanted a cutout look, as you hold the card you get a glimpse of more to come. Using the same method as the first round of dots (step 1) I misted the card, loaded up my blending palette, and painted away. I let the colors layer up. The nice thing is, it's quick. For all four cards, it took me perhaps 10 mins to do the inside.

Let Dry.

Step 6: Lettering!

The sans serif font used for "it's my" and "let's" I used whatever purple marker and gold pen I found.

The "Birthday" and "Celebrate" in a "fancy" font got special treatment.

I used a pentel sign pen for "birthday", it has a nice flexible nib that you can easily get a "thick down, thin upstroke" look popular these days in many signs you see - look up "live, laugh, love" in an image search.

For "celebrate" I used the calligraphy pen, it has a square nib and wasn't flexible at all. I had to recall back (20 ish years now, gah really I just said that) to the lone calligraphy class I took and struggled to remember how to best hold the calligraphy pen.

Lastly, "presence, not presents" was in sharpie and that's my handwriting. A friendly reminder that lettering and typography are no indication of handwriting.

Share your art! I love to see creativity and expression.

Until next week dear reader.