Jungle invitation

I woke up this morning at 4am, unable to sleep, so I got up and started doing some work on some new invitations.

I'd been wanting to do some variations of my fishy invitations, which are a fun design that are really easy for me to mass produce, once all the customizations are done.

For me, often the biggest hurdle is finding good artwork. I'm not an illustrator and have to rely on finding artwork that suits me. A really great resource is http://www.istockphoto.com/ which has thousands of great images that they sell for next to nothing.

I use Adobe Illustrator to design my cards in and generally am looking for nice illustrations (vector-based artwork -- drawings as opposed to photographs). Images in this type of format allow for easy manipulation (resizing, splitting apart, recoloring, etc).

This morning, I lucked out and found a series of adorable jungle animals that I could easily adapt to the wheel invitation design. Some cute jungle foliage artwork worked well to make the background look interesting. Shown is an early draft. I'm not done fiddling around with it yet, but I wanted to share what I had so far. Hopefully I'll be able to finish this up and post it on etsy in the next week or so!

Just wanted to share this sneak preview...