As always, if you need help with Illustrator, take a look at “Illustrator Notes & Problem Solvers“, “The Illustrator Toolbar” and some of the previous tutorials (there are different techniques in each one). For those who [...]]]> Today’s printable wedding invitations tutorial is a classic and super simple Illustrator invitation featuring a pair of gold wedding bands.

As always, if you need help with Illustrator, take a look at “Illustrator Notes & Problem Solvers“, “The Illustrator Toolbar” and some of the previous tutorials (there are different techniques in each one). For those who are brand new to Illustrator, a good one to start with is the pink photo Save the date cards.

The invite we are making today looks like this:

To get it to look exactly like this, you will also need a corner rounder cutting tool (there are lots of different kinds, this is the one I use, I love it) and a gold leaf pen.

1. Download the wedding bands vector here. It comes with five different ring designs, so if you prefer a different look for the rings, you might find another one that you like in the set. Unzip the file and open the ring eps file you want to use (I’m using #3).

2. Select all (either with a keyboard shortcut or drag around the entire illustration with the black arrow tool) and copy.

3. Create a new document (file – new) and make it the size you want it to be. I made mine 5×7. Once you’re in your new document, paste the vector. While everything is still selected, group it (Object – Group). As you can see, the illustration is huge, larger than the invitation, so in the Transform palette, type in the size you want (make sure the “Constrain With and Height Proportions” is on). I made mine 1.75″ wide and let the height be whatever it needs to be to keep it proportionate. Drag it down to the lower right hand corner (or wherever you want it to be).

4. Create a new layer and add your text. I used Myriad Pro, 12pt, regular, black, for the text part, and Coronet Italic, 30pt, colored in Pantone 8006 C (metallic) for the bride and groom. Space the text out as you want it, and drag the whole text block to where you want it to be.

5. Print on card stock, cut the corners and run the gold leaf pen all around the edges. Done!

I recently had to throw a nice big Tiffany box out (it fell victim [...]]]> It’s time for another Illustrator step-by-step tutorial. Today, I thought we’d move on from the beach theme wedding invitations and do an invite for those who are centering their wedding around a specific color – that beautiful Tiffany blue we all love.

I recently had to throw a nice big Tiffany box out (it fell victim to our basement being flooded during a recent storm) and it really bothered me, I love to keep them and use them to store trinkets and paper craft supplies, etc. (why I had put it in the basement in the first place, I don’t know, it probably happened during a mad cleaning session!). Anyway, seeing it reminded me what a gorgeous color it is, and I was inspired to create today’s invite.

This is the invitation we’ll be making:

and here’s how:

1. Start by downloading the vector file we are basing the invitation on. It is called “Leaves on curly branches” and was designed by DragonArtz Designs. You can download it here and please make sure to read the license.

2. Open your downloaded file and copy the entire design. Open a new Illustrator document and size it 5.25×5.25. Paste the design into your new document. It will be much larger than your document, so in the Transform palette, put in 5 for the width (and make sure you have it set to constrain the proportions). It will be smaller than the document, but that’s fine, we’ll fix that later.

3. I didn’t like the roses in the design, so to get rid of them, you want to click on one with your white arrow and then go to Select – Same – Fill Color. That will select all of them, and you can just hit delete.

4. Next, select the entire design with your black arrow and move it up so that the upper left hand corner of the black square matches up with the corner of your document. With the design still selected, grab the square in the lower right hand corner and pull until it matches up perfectly with you document. Take a look at the top of the design once you’ve done that, chances are you need to adjust that again too. Zoom in to make sure everything is lined up correctly. You’ll notice that part of the branches are outside your document – that’s fine, don’t worry about it.

5. Now, to make things easier, I like to put the different parts of the design on separate layers. Select the background square (with the white arrow), cut it, create a new layer (which will automatically end up on top of the other layer, so pull it to the bottom), lock the old layer and paste the box in place (Cntrl + F) on the new layer. Lock that layer and go back to the other one.

6. Unlock the layer with the branch design and with your white arrow, draw a box around the branches in the lower left hand corner (make sure you get every little piece of it). Cut, create a new layer, lock the original layer and paste the branches in place (Cntrl + F) on your new layer.

7. We can leave the other branches on the original layer, since that’s all that’s there now. So now you have three layers to work with. Lock the top two, unlock the background layer, select the box, and now we want to change the color to the Tiffany Blue. With your box selected, double click on the fill square in the toolbar. This will bring up the color selection window, and you want to put 9AE4E8 in the hex color box (the last one in the left column). Click ok and your box is now blue. As you can see, the branches are perfect the way they are, so no re-coloring needed there.

8. Next, we need the “framedoodle” from the “Damask Engagement Party Invitation” post, so if you have created that one already, great, just open that design and copy the framedoodle. If you didn’t, hop over to that post and follow the instructions to how to create one.

9. Once you have your framedoodle, copy it and paste it on a separate layer in your Tiffany Blue document. As you can see, this is not quite right, so select the framedoodle, right click, go to Transform – Rotate and put in 90 in the window and click ok. Now it’s on the right end, but looks a bit narrow, so select it and pull one of the side boxes until you like what you see. Place it in the center.

10. This looks nice, but isn’t quite the look I was going for, so next, select the framedoodle, and change the fill color to C5EFEF (the same way we did it in step 7). Now, we want a nice thin white border too, so select it again, and change the border color to white. Make sure you have the Stroke color selected in the toolbar and just go to the color palette and click on the little white box in the lower right hand corner. If the border looks a bit heavy, like mine did, select the framedoodle again and in the Stroke palette, change the weight to 0.25.

11. This is starting to look nice, right? Just a few more tweaks… next, let’s add the text. Create a new layer and lock all the others. Pick the Text tool from the toolbar and type in the first line. Don’t worry about how it looks right now, we just want to get the text in there and then we’ll style it. Click on any other tool and then go back and select the text tool again and type in the name of the bride and groom. Click on any other tool and then go back and select the text tool again and type in the rest of the text. The reason for doing this is that we want 3 separate text boxes.
If you want the “other text” (i.e. not the bride & groom) in caps, type it in in caps, I’m not using an all caps font for this. It will end up looking something like this:

12. Now we want to make it look good. Change the fonts first. I used Autumn, Regular, 9pt for the “other text” and Ribbon 131 Bold BT, Bold, 24pt (with a 26pt leading) for the bride & groom. You also want the text to be centered, so in the Paragraph palette, select Centered. As usual, if you don’t have these fonts, see my “How to add fonts to your computer” post. Or if you want to use other fonts, you can obviously do that too!

13. Move the text around until you like how it looks and make sure the text blocks are lined up by selecting them and click on Horizontal Align Center.

14. I also changed the colors of the text. The “other text” is 494648 and the bride & groom 873C5B.

15. As you can see, part of the branches are hidden behind the framedoodle, so we want to fix that. Just select the layer (in the layers palette) with the framedoodle and pull it down below the branch layers, so that it ends up just above the blue box layer. Voila – the branches are in front of it!

If you like it like this, by all means leave it this way, but I wanted to pull the branches off of the text and to do that you need to:

16. Lock all layers and unlock one of the branch layers. Select it with the black arrow and either make it a bit smaller by pulling on one of the little white boxes, or just move it out to the side. Do the same thing with the other branch layer, and once you like what you see, it’s done!

I would print this on nice, heavy white cardstock, and you can fit two on a landscape letter sized sheet. Part of the branches are still going to hang on the outside of the invites, but it doesn’t matter, since they will be trimmed to size anyway.

This is the beach themed wedding invitation [...]]]> So far in our beach wedding invitations tutorials, we have made a funky 70s sunset invitation and a fun ocean floor invite, both in Illustrator. Today, we’re making a very simple and traditional invitation using Microsoft Word (you need Vista to be able to do one of the steps).

This is the beach themed wedding invitation we’re making:

and here’s how to do it:

1. Download the shell illustration here. Just select PNG full size under the image, and then right click on it and do a Save Image As (you want it to be a PNG file) and put it somewhere on your computer where you can easily find it.

2. Open a new document in word and make sure you save it as a Word Document, not in any previous version. You need the Vista format in order to re-color the shell.

3. Go to Insert – Picture and find the shell. You’ll see that it’s upside down, so the first thing you need to do is select it, right click and go to Text Wrapping. Select In Front of text. Then go to Picture Tools – Format – Rotate and rotate it vertical.

4. To change the color of the shell, right click on it and go to Format Picture. A new window pops up, and you want to go to Picture (next to last in the menu on the left hand side). There, click on Recolor and you’ll get a drop down menu of color choices. I went with the blue in Light Variations, but you can make it any color you want of course.

5. Next, go to Insert – Shapes and select the rectangle tool. Draw a box, any size you want, and then right click on it and go to Format Auto Shape to change the size and look. I wanted to make my invitation a 5×7, so we need to make the border a little bit smaller than that. To do so, go to the Size tab and just type in your dimensions (make sure Absolute is selected for both values. I made mine 4.7 x 6.7.

6. To make the borders look nicer, go to the Colors and Lines tab. Make sure the Fill Color is set to No Color and change the Line Color to a matching blue. You also want to change the Style and Weight. I chose the next to last option in the Style drop down menu, and left the weight at the default, 4.5 pt.

7. Now we need to add the text. Go to Insert – Text Box and in the drop down menu select Draw Text Box. Draw one any size you want, we’re going to adjust it later anyway. Type in your text and change the fonts and colors. I used ACaslon RegularSC 12pt black for the text and ShelleyVolante BT 24pt Bold in a matching blue for the bride and groom. If you want to use these fonts but don’t have them, read my How To Add Fonts To Your Computer post. For more font inspiration, check out my “More Font Ideas For Your Wedding Stationery” post.

8. Next, we need to make this mess look good. Right click on the text box and set the Fill and Line Colors to No Color. Drag the shell over to where you want it on the invitation and drag the handles to size it. Pull the text box to where you want it. If something disappears behind something else and you need it to show up, select it, right click, go to Order and select the appropriate option. Once you like the way it looks, you’re done!

I would print this on nice heavy cardstock and trim it to size. Or if you have bought printable 5×7 sheets, just change the size of your word document to 5×7 and print away.

As always, if you need to brush up on your Illustrator skills, go through one of my earlier [...]]]> In the previous beach wedding invitation tutorial, we made a fast and easy, 1970s-inspired, very informal invitation. Today, we’re making one with a totally different look which is a little bit more work-intensive, but definitely worth the effort.

As always, if you need to brush up on your Illustrator skills, go through one of my earlier tutorials (the Save The Date Postcards – A Step-By-Step Illustrator Guide post is particularly detailed) and take a look at the Illustrator Tools and problem solvers. For font issues, see the How To Add Fonts To Your Computer post.

OK, let’s get started. This is the invitation we are going to make:

and here’s how to do it.

1. First, download the illustration here.

NOTE: It was recently brought to my attention that this vector file is no longer available for download. If you want to use it for your invitations, contact me and I will email it to you.

2. Unzip and open in Illustrator. Select everything and make it the size you want it to be (I made mine 5×7). The easiest way to do that is to, with everything selected, type in the dimensions in the Transform palette (make sure the Constrain Width and Height Proportions is not active).

If you don’t see the Transform palette, go to Windows – Transform and it will open.

3. The next thing I did was to select all the fishes and put them on a separate layer. This is a bit time consuming, but you’ll be happy you did it when you need to move them around to make room for the text.

So select all the fishes with the Direct Selection Tool (white arrow), cut and paste on a new layer (to paste them in the exact same spot on the new layer, press CNTRL+F). Make sure you select their eyes too, otherwise they’ll stay on the “ocean floor” layer. If your new layer is above the ocean floor layer, drag it beneath it.

4. Lock both these layers and create two new layers. In the first one, type in your text. I used Papyrus 12pt (black) for the text and Papyrus 18pt (R 0, G 156, B 197) for the bride and groom (spaced at 30pt). Depending on your wording, you may have to space all the text differently to make it fit and look good.

5. Lock that layer and go to the next to add the ampersand. I used Dahrlin Regular at 48pt (R 0, G 117, B 139). Move it around until you like what you see.

6. Tweak everything until it looks good. Play with fonts, font size and word spacing, move the fishes around, resize items. Once you like it, you’re done!

And for those of us in the northeastern part of the [...]]]> Who doesn’t like the beach? Good things happen on beaches – parties, vacations, relaxation; all kinds of fun. My best friend got engaged on a beach. The more exotic ones are stunningly gorgeous with their palm trees, white sand and crystal clear, turquoise water.

And for those of us in the northeastern part of the US (mid-Atlantic too for that matter), a palm-fringed beach with balmy breezes sounds pretty good right about now. So what better place to have a wedding than in such a beautiful setting where people naturally relax and feel happy?

I personally love beach weddings, and today, I’m starting a mini-series of Illustrator tutorials on making your own beach themed printable wedding invitations, each with a very different look.

If you’re pretty new to Illustrator and haven’t done any of my other tutorials, you may want to read the Illustrator Toolbar and Illustrator Problem Solvers posts. Also, my first Illustrator tutorial post, “Save the date postcards – A step by step Illustrator guide” goes through the tools and steps more thoroughly than I do here.

We are starting with a 1970s-inspired sunset invitation, perfect for a more unconventional, informal affair. It’s super-easy and fast to make. If this is so not your style, don’t worry – the next beach wedding invitation will have a totally different feel.

1. Download the illustration here

2. Unzip it and open the ai (illustrator) file in Illustrator.

3. Lock the layer with the palm trees and sun, and change the size of the background layer to the size you want your invitation (I made mine an A2 – 6.25×4.5). Make sure you’ve selected everything on this layer before you do this – there is more than one part to this illustration. Once you’re done, lock the background layer.

4. Unlock the layer with the palm trees, select everything and drag it over to the left hand side of the background. Just somewhere over there is good, we’ll fine-tune it later.

5. Lock that layer and create a new layer for the text.

6. Select the text tool and type in you text. I used Braddon regular at 18pts for the “Join us” and “Mr & Mrs parts” and 14pts for the rest. As always, if you don’t have this font, read my post about adding fonts to your computer. Or use a totally different font – you’re only limited by your own imagnation.

7. Make sure the text is placed exactly where you want it, and lock the text layer. Unlock the palm tree layer, select everything on it, and move them around until they look good to you. As you can see, my trees are hanging over the edge, but that’s fine, because I am going to cut the card to size so that part will just be trimmed off.

As always, if you get stuck, see if you can find help in my Illustrator tips or [...]]]> This tutorial is based on a Save the Date card we created earlier, so if you missed it and want to give these invitations a try, just hop on over to that post and put that card together first.

As always, if you get stuck, see if you can find help in my Illustrator tips or by doing a quick review of the Illustrator toolbar.

Turning your Hummingbird Save the Date card into printable wedding invitations is super easy! This is how I did it:

1. Open the Save the Date card you created earlier.

2. Go to File – Save As and save it as Hummingbird Invite (or whatever you want to call it).

3. In your Hummingbird Invite document, go to File – Document Setup and in the dimension windows, put 5 for width and 7 for height (if you want to go the traditional route).

4. Unlock the bottom layer, click on your 5×5 background color square and in your Transform palette, put in 5 for the width and 7 for the height. If you don’t see the Transform palette, just go to Window – Transform and it will pop right up. Align your box with your document. Lock this layer.

5. I happened to like both where the illustration ended up by chance and the size of it on the invite, but you can obviously resize it and move it any way you want. If you want to do it my way, just leave it where it is and make sure that layer is locked too.

6. Go to your text layer and change your text.

That’s it!

If you want to keep the invite square, that’s obviously even easier. All I would do then is just make the illustration a little bit smaller and change the text. You may have to space it a little bit differently than I did on the 5×7 invite to make it fit, or change the wording slightly. Be creative and play around with the layout until it looks good to you.

1. Look (online, unless you happen to be traveling) at what they are doing in other countries. “Wedding invitation” [...]]]> Printing your own invites is a great way to add personality to your wedding, but sometimes we all get stuck and need some new, good ideas. Here are a few ways to get your creative juices flowing:

1. Look (online, unless you happen to be traveling) at what they are doing in other countries. “Wedding invitation” is called “huwelijks uitnodiging” in Dutch, “invitation de marriage” in French, “hochzeitseinladung” in German, “invito di cerimonia nuziale” in Italian, “convite do casamento” in Portugese, “invitación de la boda” in Spanish and “brollopsinbjudan” in Swedish. And don’t forget to look in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa and other countries where English is the main language, or widely spoken (it does make it easier!).

2. Look at the websites of creative artists. They don’t necessarily have to be wedding-related – just looking at the art by a photographer, graphic designer, painter, interior decorator, or DIY blogger may trigger ideas.

3. Look in magazines. Any magazine, not just wedding ones. I especially like Creating Keepsakes and Martha Stewart Crafts online, and Real Simple and Domino in print. Look at the layouts and even the ads. See what you like and what might translate nicely to an invitation. Remember, there is no rule saying your invite has to look like everyone else’s.

4. Brainstorm with a bunch of friends. This one is sort of a no-brainer, but it’s easy to forget that great ideas sometimes come from a fun evening with friends. Open a few bottles of wine, order pizza or put out some cheese and crackers and let the ideas flow. I always get my best ides when I’m not trying too hard.

5. Take a creative class at a local shop or adult education facility. Anything that sounds interesting to you – rubber stamping, embossing, jewelry making, die-cutting, decoupage, scrapbooking, using various craft tools – all will jumpstart your creativity.