Wedding Art for Cool Cats

Recently made a wedding art gift piece for some of our friends who are very cool. They know all the memes, all the refs, and even quoted Ralph Wiggum in their wedding vows. Couldn't just do what I normally do with gumnuts and flowers - it's just not their style. So I trawled through their Instagram which is pretty much a gallery of stylish travel pictures, and used this research to figure out what I would do instead. The loose goal in my head was to create something original combining the following themes and ideas: Japan, 'cool', personal holiday photographs, Pop Art, collage, Los Angeles (at least the feel of - backwards caps, basketball, little bit of grunge, the 1990s, the setting of 500 Days of Summer), the couple themselves and some sort of ode to Vampire Weekend (the band). It had been a while since I've done something different like this, but creating in this more thought provoking way is what I really love to do!

The following are travel shots from @kapinny's instagram:

Japanese Street

Michelle in Lake Toya, Japan

Harajuku, Japan

Urban Lights installation in Los Angeles, USA feat. Mich

I ended up settling on the great, grungy picture they took in Harajuku, Japan. I then cut out the photographs, experimented with compositions.

Definitely felt like a creepy stalker printing out and cutting up pictures of our friends. (Remember Robin Williams in that movie One Hour Photo) Just hoped that we had no unexpected visitors turn up!

Laughed at the off-scale version of the couple here. Kavin is taller than Mich, but not this much taller!

Once I placed the Sukiya sign and vending machine in these positions, I was more confident with how I would proceed.

Wood burning ground work for bottom layer.

Other layers collaged, painted, drawn and embossed. Recreating Japanese graffiti is really hard!

This is the final version before Kavin and Michelle enter the piece! I also decided to change the sign lights to their original silver in the final version. The gold was too soft.

And the final piece entitled Modern Newlyweds of Harajuku:

And for the wedding card...

The following VW album covers paved the way and allowed me to use the photo I loved of Michelle at Lake Toya.

Floral, earthy gift wrapping to throw them off the scent! Absolutely perfect wedding day which reinforced all themes contained within the piece! Hooray!