Creating the Wedding Invitation Illustration

So I was honored when asked to do the wedding invitation cover for my sister's wedding. The wedding's on Sunday and I'm taking off tomorrow morning, so I figured in that spirit I'd post about the evolution of that cover. After asking, she sent me these invitations as a jumping off point.

I decided to go with a little bit less playful, less cartoony style-and we went back and forth with emails of the pic. I scanned the web for reference of Jerusalem, flowers, and brides/grooms, and put something together that worked. I then basically went exactly off of that.

The version above is actually my favorite, with the slight color and the pencil tones. It could only be black and white in the end, so I inked the entire thing-a process that took longer then the initial penciling, and took a lot of the life out of it, but made it much, much bolder.
In the end, I'm happy with how it turned out, and glad I was able to give something I liked in a style I'd never played with before.

Here's the finish after printing:

The inside:
And out in the wild:
Here it is, all framed and ready to be given as a present (I'm banking on Marissa not reading my blog until after wedding madness has subsided):
Still to come, fun with the monogram.