Custom Birth Announcement
– Forest Celebration –
– A custom made piece from first enquiry to final delivery –
“Marthe helped us tremendously. In a really short amount of time she made a beautiful design and executed the card. “
Client’s requests
Through an e-mail Ellen requested a design for the birth announcements cards for her daughter. She told me she roamed around the website and saw one of the papercut nightlights I made, that featured the name of her soon-to-be-born daughter; Cato. They loved the design and wanted this (or something similar) for their birth announcement cards. “We thought it was faith that we would stumble upon your site.“ she wrote.
The only catch was, her due date was less than a month away…
For the design they wanted a lovely cute forest as they saw in the nightlight, for them that design really didn’t need to change much, but it needed to be a single layer. They didn’t want any owls in there, but loved to see other birds.
The card would be a landscape orientation, or square with the fawn repeated on the inside.
Ellen is an art historian and really appreciated the different styles of artists, they wanted a piece of art for their announcement cards instead of any cookie-cutter design from a website. They had asked another artist to design the announcement card for their eldest daughter and loved to see the personal touch. Of course this was perfect as it gave me free reign to go about it however I wanted to.
Given the time constraints she asked me to make the print-ready file and to arrange for the printing and all other things.
The maincolour used for the card of their eldest daughter was a nice shade of dark blue. To link these two, very different designs, together, I chose to use the same blue for the background of the card and for the fawn on the inside of the card.
Designing the papercut
With this design it was really clear where to start; the papercut nightlight.
As the little fawn and the bunting was a big element of the nightlight, I used those for the new design and thought I would cut Cato’s name in the bunting as I did for many of these lights.
Especially with papercuts for children I like to tell a little story in the designs, so I decided that the animals would set Cato’s welcome party and hang the buntings. The mother of the baby foxes that were on the second layer of the nightlight, took one end of the bunting in this new design and the squirrels in the tree took the other. Then I added some more forest creatures to observe all this activity.
The endresult
After approval of the design and the cutting process we discussed the fonts and lay-out for the design. As with all custom announcements all is possible with regards to this, so they chose blue colours for the text and two different fonts as they did in the card of their eldest daughter. They also chose a nice textured papertype for the card to be printed on. I photographed the papercut to create beautiful cast shadows, so the printed cards would look like they had the actual papercut on top.
In the end, because Ellen was always so quick to answer my questions, we even managed to get this card (of course without the final information) all ready before Cato was born!
What the client said:
*Translated from Dutch*
“In our search for a unique birth announcement we found this website. With a beautiful light where our daughters name was already featured! That was obviously a coincidence, but we took it as a sign.
Marthe helped us tremendously. In a really short amount of time she made a beautiful design and executed the card. The contact went smoothly and very pleasant. We’re very happy with the end result and had some great responses to it!”
- Inspired? -
I'd love to hear what you have in mind for your papercut and how
we can work together to make this reality.
Just contact me to request a custom quote and ask all the questions you may have.
- I'm looking forward to hearing from you! -