D.I.Y. Birthday Invitations!

Once upon a time I paid $80,000 for about 7 years worth of college, 5 of which ended me up with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from The Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Now you may ask what does one do with an 'art degree' and I wouldn't know how to answer really. What I do with mine is make my daughter really cute birthday invitations. Last year (her first birthday) we went with a MONSTER theme. Yes, you heard right a 1 year old MONSTER themed birthday party. It ruled. For this we kicked it old school with brown lunch bags, pipe cleaners, glue, markers & construction paper. It looked AWESOME and it costs a fortune to mail (whoops). These were fun to make and took little to no artistic ability:

This year we decided upon a more classical "girl" birthday theme: A Tea Party. This is not because we were pressured, or trying to 'girly girl' her up or anything - the girl loves tea parties! We are constantly sipping air from mini tea cups and we thought she'd really enjoy having a really big tea party with all her pals. As you could see our invites from last year were pretty bad ass and it is pretty impossible to one up them, but I gave it a shot. For the sake of saving about 40 hours I decided to draw one invite and then have it printed as opposed to hand-making 50 unique ones like last year. I must be getting lazy in my old age? Rather recently I remembered seeing a tea cup tattoo on the FUCK YEAH, TATTOOS! blog and felt inspired to go that route with these. So when Sierra went down for her nap I got out the micron's and sketchpads and got to it:

This was the first initial drawing. (Unfinished)

After I had the drawing finished I got out the lamp and tracing paper and cleaned it up a bit. 

After I was done drawing (and writing) the front and back I scanned them in I tossed them on a fake paper background for Facebook, Emailing, etc.

The next day I took the file over to a local print shop in Downtown Boston and got about 50 of them printed front and back, 25 on gray and 25 on yellow. These are for the physical ones we're mailing out! 

I really love how they came out! They are 5x7"

Here is how they look on a bright yellow!

So the invite is taken care of now just to figure out how to turn our apartment into a tea party palace. Open to ideas so please throw em at me also I'd love to see photos and hear about your kids birthday themes, invitation and decorations! xo -Craig