When an Illustrator Plans a Wedding

Things get VERY intensely DIY

Hello!! The wedding happened! It was last weekend and it was great.

It went by in a bit of a blur so I’m currently in the process of making a couple diary posts as a way to remember all the little things that happened. Until then, I wanted to share a little preview of all the little details we made ourselves because it was a lot of fun designing everything for our wedding.

Part One: The Invitations

In case you may have forgotten, when I was 19 years old I worked at a wedding firm in Taiwan where I designed invitations as well as an iconic Minion themed wedding. You can read about that here if you missed it. So basically, I had trained my entire life for this and it was finally time for me to make my own, 10 years later.

Here is the Pinterest board inspiration for the invitations.

From that inspiration, here were three sketches I did for the invitation:

But of course, this wasn’t just MY wedding, it was OUR wedding. Many of you may not know, but Adam actually studied illustration just like me. He is a man of many talents and he is also a brilliant artist alongside his many other pursuits. Since this wedding was a union, we decided that we would design the invitation together.

So I presented these options to Adam and of course, he picked the third option with us on a bike (remember he LOVES bikes).

Address blurred out

My vision for this sketch was that I would draw our characters in the middle and he would draw the lush border filled with flowers and foliage.

We worked on Procreate so we could have a consistent look as we have very different styles.

And here is the final invitation:

It came out super cute and I LOVE the border Adam did. He definitely did more work than me lol.

Aside from the front of the invitation, I also designed the back of the invitation which included information linking to our wedding website (which I also designed). We also had a more intimate Sunday Tea the next day which I reused his border to design:

Left: back of invitation, Right: Sunday Tea invitation

We sent these invitations through text to our friends and family first, and then I also ordered some printed invitations from Catprint on some really nice cream cardstock. I decided to splurge on some nice rounded corners too and it came out ADORABLE!!!

I also ordered kraft envelopes which I hand lettered for each person.

So these were the invitations we sent out.

But remember my last post?

In case you forgot, a month before the wedding, we had to change our location and so in a frenzy I designed some last minute invitations to text out to everybody:

Phew. These ones came out cute too tbh despite being whipped up really quickly.

And the week of the wedding, we sent out these maps which was modified from the map they have on their website!

Part Two: Wedding Website

Okay, this was actually the first thing I made.

I ended up using Adobe Portfolio since that’s what I use for my own website and Adobe provides a couple free websites if you’re subscribed. There are a lot more pages but honestly I was too lazy to put it together so here is just how one of the pages look. Trust me the website was cute!

Part Three: Signage

I honestly had zero ideas for seating charts, I just knew that I didn’t want a big sign that felt like a science project. While browsing Pinterest (like I said this wedding was basically sponsored by Pinterest), I came across some cute seating chart ideas with wine bottles like below:

So a month out from the wedding, we tasked Adam’s family with drinking bottles of wine we could use. Luckily they were prepared for the task.

After cleaning off the bottles, I designed the seating chart labels.

At first, we were going to make each table be a generic number, then Adam had a brilliant idea of naming the labels after different animals. WAY more fun this way. So I designed the labels around the different animals:

They looked SO cute I was dying.

After I designed them, I printed them out.

This seems like the right time to mention that this wedding also would not have been possible without:

HAMMERMILL CREAM PRINTER PAPER!!!!!

THE TRUE LOVE OF MY LIFE!!!!

I printed just about ALL the signage, zines, etc on my shitty brother printer. But once I slotted in some cream paper, it came out looking SO fancy and intentional. THANK YOU MR HAMMERMILL!!!

Anyways, I printed out all the signs, trimmed them and stuck them on each bottle with double sided tape.

Then I designed the individual cards that would go on each table. Here was the vision:

And here they are printed out. Adam made all the wood stands for the signs!

This also seems like a good time to mention all the crazy things Adam constructed for this wedding. About a week out from the wedding when we were in DollarTree buying vases, I wanted to grab a shitty crate to use as a bar topper. Adam stopped me and said “I can make a better one.”

And he delivered!!!

Adam constructing the bar topper

The bar topper before being oiled

WOW I LOVE BIG STRONG MAN!!!! Anyways this it before it was oiled. Incredible. I’ll share all the final photos of everything at the wedding at the end.

Part Four: Guest Gifts

For the individual guests, we needed up come up with name cards for the table setting. Originally I was just going to make basic name cards like this or something:

Courtesy of pinterest ofc lmao

But then I had an idea, what if we had “postcards” that each guest could bring home? I ran the idea by Adam and he loved it. At first we were going to draw the postcard too, but we were so tired by this point we decided using a photo would be cute and also a lot of the older folks would probably prefer a photo over a drawing.

What we sent to the printers. My friend Laura took this photo :)

The plan was to hand letter each name along with a note, and slot that into the napkin setting. You can see how it turned out at the reveal at the end!!

Because I’m so extra, I also decided that I wanted to print out a couple zines of how Adam and I originally met. You can read the comic here.

I made a couple variations and ended up going with the cropped square zine. This was also printed on my beloved cream paper with my Brother printer. Since I didn’t have a booklet stapler, I just ran these through my sewing machine with low tension and a wide stitch length.

Phew. Okay. We’re nearly done. Now for my favorite part…

Part Five: Florals

This actually isn’t my section.

This section belongs to Adam!

Another thing you may not know about Adam, he is a wizard with paper crafts. He often builds my window displays from cardboard for me and he loves anything origami. So about a month out from the wedding, I asked if he could make some big paper flowers we could use to decorate. Of course, he said yes.

We accidentally bought tissue paper, which turned out to not be the same thing as crepe paper. But alas, Adam forged on while we waited for the crepe paper to arrive and he whipped these up in one night:

I made one of the little ones lol

While I was looking at paper flower inspiration, I stumbled across this Tiktok of a girl who makes crepe paper bouquets:

SO PRETTY!!

So I turned to Adam and asked if he could make my bouquet and he said “OF COURSE” and proceeded to hyper-fixate for the next two weeks.

Once the crepe paper arrived, Adam was working 8-10 hours straight making paper flowers each day.

Here’s one of the first ones he made:

From there, the flowers became more and more complex…

And he continued on… and on…

Until he made a whole damn bouquet:

He’s insane!!!! The craziest part is that he didn’t look up any tutorials for any of these flowers. He just told me to pick real flower types and figured out the build himself. He also made his own boutonniere.

Final Part: The Reveal!!!!

Okay okay, this post has been crazy long.

Thank you for your patience, here are the final photos of all the decor!

These photos are all thanks to our AMAZING photographer Justin Kunimoto. Highly recommend him if you are in search of a wedding/engagement photographer in the DMV area. I’ll share more in the upcoming weeks but here are all the shots he took of our decor.

Also another shout out to all my friends, Laura, Monica, Jess, Dan, Vikki, Guy, Kait, Lily & Edward for being absolute troopers and helping us set up everything on the day!!

I actually made this welcome sign last minute, and just repurposed all the graphics we had. We printed it as a poster at Staples and just stuck it onto some foam board!

We had some film cameras for guests to use that were placed with the zines I printed.

Close up of the zine!

Our honeymoon fund box :)

Final bar topper Adam made + bar menu I made

We had a specialty cocktail that Adam’s dad, Rodney, came up with. He named it 23 & Lex, as that is the crossroads where we met. The cocktail is made of:

• Kavalan whiskey, an award winning Taiwanese whiskey

• Mango nectar, the national fruit of the Philippines (Adam is half filipino)

• Pineapple juice, a popular fruit from both Taiwan & Philippines

• Blood Orange San Pellegrino, for Adam’s Italian side

• And finally, a sprinkle of Old Bay seasoning to represent Baltimore (where Adam grew up)

Anyways, the drink was the most delicious cocktail I’ve ever had and I don’t even like whiskey that much! 10/10 go Rodney!

The seating chart

Head table was pig for my friends (duh) and shark for Adam cause he LOVES sharks. You can also see another paper flower he made slotted in on our table!

Below are how the table settings turned out:

The final table placement (guests took these photos)

And lastly, I forgot to mention, Adam also made our cake stand!

How special!! Here it is with our little cake:

Look at that beautiful cake stand!!

The cake itself was chocolate raspberry and we also had mini donuts since donuts are such a crucial part of how we met!

I have nowhere else to share these photos so here are more photos of the cake lol

Finally, here are how the paper flowers turned out:

Adam’s boutonnière he made himself

And finally, my bouquet!!!

It rained all morning so we completely forgot to take a photo of it, and it is my biggest regret that I didn’t get many photos with it except for me walking down the aisle.

I’m being crazy though and planning to meet up with our photographer so he can get some shots of it because I will literally never know peace unless I get some photos of the bouquet.

Anyway, that concludes wedding post, part one.

Let’s see when I get to working on the other parts, but hopefully the Substack fans are satiated for now!

Also a HUGE thank you to paid subscribers for supporting us and paying for a little portion of this wedding! Love you guys :)