Wedding Blues

Whose getting married? Not me... though not like I don't think about it but I feel its way to early for little old me! So why bring up the topic of weddings? Well my coworker has commissioned me to make a custom wedding scene that has both the tradition Chinese wedding and the American Wedding since she is of both cultures. It was indeed a daunting feat. Here's how it went...
First off i start with smooth Bristol paper... my favorite kind because the texture is smooth and also good to write with such as markers which is my medium of choice but I'm also really into charcol and pastels! The actual size of this was 9 inches by 13 inches including the half an inch margin i frame the piece with. The plan was to create 4 panels depicting how the wedding ceremonies would be... 2 dedicated each one in rotating order. I wasn't drawing this one out she and I talked it out and it would be a collage... i suppose... since it was my idea and I wanted to play outside my safe zone of drawing.The red parts were the Chinese weddings and the white one was the American wedding. I used old red envelopes from over the years and picked and choose certain ones depending on what it displayed and the texture. The great thing about red envelopes (which are used to give money to people during Chinese New Year) is that there are countless of designs and most are embossed with gold. Those browns are the begining of the doors and where the walls meet the floor. Here comes the tricky part... the details of the buildings and... the people... can't have a wedding without people...
So the people I hand drawn and hand cut and placed in either pews or a table depending which panel they were in. I had started putting in small details such as the flowers in the black vases with the "ribbons" hanging down on the church walls. Black is not the usual color for a wedding for either cultures but i googled some pictures of church weddings and there was this one that was lovely and used black and it didn't have a morbid feel to it so I try to captured that. She wanted flowers so i added in the white flowers surrounded with an aura of pink that i cut out from some origami paper. Four and a half hours later...
This is the final product I had alot of fun doing the bride and groom. I was plannign to make them wear half Chinese and Half American clothing but i thought it was more fun and easier on my part to intergrate them. The bride's top is red as tradition of Chinese with golden embossed flowers hanging down (though it should've been a phoenix but there was none I could find.) The white dress and everything else is from folded crepe paper and it gave it this soft texture. The groom is wearing all white with a red trimmings. I created a boarder of the remaining bristol paper. It took a while but i love how it turned out... I hope she likes it.

My Wedding contest is still up and on the left tab under contests =D!

BTW my "ghost story" was featured on another blog http://uniquenurses.blogspot.com/ check them out! They're awesome crafty nurses!