Wedded Topography

While I couldn't post this before the wedding had happened, I wanted to share this invitation I designed and drew for my good friends James Kennedy and Heather Norborg, since it ended up being such fun to produce. James and Heather were willing to part with sanity enough to let me do whatever I wanted, so, knowing their affinity for travel, I had Heather draw up a list, in chronological order, of all the places they'd been together. She then had to say how long they'd been at each of these places and how significant/great their time there was, on a scale of -10 to +10, and I used all of that data to build their mythological island (I should probably also mention that Heather is a librarian and James is an author of fantasy/adventure books for young adults, so a map that looked like it might come from an ancient book seemed all the more appropriate).

To shape the island I used the time spent in each location as the size of each land formation, and the significance/greatness rating as the altitude for the land formation. Starting from the left hand edge and spiraling inward, I posited the land masses and – presto – the land of Noredy. The water around the island stems from where they grew up and where they live now. The ugly slug in the water was based on their answer to my question of "What is you biggest fear as a couple?" All those ancient maps have a cool sea beast in them, after all. (I based the beast's look on an old Icelandic map creature.)

Congratulations to James and Heather (one of my favorite couples (in addition to being stellar people individually)), and thanks for letting me produce a slightly insane, 18 x 24" fold out map for your invitation. Hopefully no grandparents were scared by the Beast of Boredom. That creature certainly wasn't present at the wedding itself.