From the Mailbox: Gorgeous Watercolor Maps by Crystal Kluge

Yesterday afternoon I was totally delighted when my mailman came and brought me a large chocolate brown colored envelope that was decorated with some gorgeous calligraphy, labels and those very awesome king & queen of hearts postage stamps that came out earlier this summer:

I get quite a bit of mail and it's not everyday that you receive a package that looks this neat on the outside. Check it out, she even calligraphed our address on the large light grey circular label on the front:

This package was from a wonderful artist/calligrapher that I worked with a couple of months ago named Crystal Kluge. Crystal and I worked together with our clients, Allison and Ryan, to create a gorgeous wedding invitation booklet, complete with hand-illustrated maps for their wedding in September. Crystal illustrated three maps for them, and did the calligraphy for several different pages of their booklets, and I letterpress printed it all, along with the art I designed for their invitation, and hand-bound it all into small invitation booklets. If you don't remember what this amazing suite looked like, check it out, here.

Anyway, in the previous post I mentioned that Allison and Ryan had commissioned Crystal to illustrate the three maps that were included in their books and I letterpress printed them. They also had me print a few loose maps on watercolor paper and send those to Crystal so that she could hand-watercolor them. Allison and Ryan wanted to have these maps as keepsakes and gorgeous art pieces that they could frame and hang up in their home. Crystal sent me photos of the finished maps she did for Allison and Ryan a couple of months ago and you can see those here. At the time, I sent Crystal a few copies of each map so she had some extras in case of mistakes or in case she wanted a set for her portfolio or for other promotional purposes.

Anyway, yesterday I opened her gorgeous envelope and found these:

Crystal water-colored a set of the letterpress printed maps and sent them back to me!! How awesome is that!?! I wasn't really expecting it because I know that doing work like this is incredibly time-consuming, but I was absolutely delighted to get them in the mail! They are gorgeous! Check it out:

This is the first map in the booklet. It shows a detail of Allison and Ryan's wedding location on the Oregon coast. The next map was a map of a large portion of western oregon and the I-5 corridor:

I love all three of these maps, but I think I love this center map the best. You can also see in the above photos the very sweet note that Crystal wrote me. And the third map was of Portland, Oregon:

Aren't her maps and watercolor work just absolutely stunning?!? If you want to see more of Crystal's work online, be sure to check out her website or her blog. She is incredibly talented and just a super-awesome person all around. If you love her style and are considering having a map, calligraphy or any hand-illustration done for your wedding invitations or another project, Crystal would be a wonderful person to contact. Believe me, it was a total pleasure working with her, and I can't wait to work with her again! It was so much fun too to receive such wonderful work and a reminder of our collaboration in the mail yesterday!

Thanks so much for the gorgeous maps Crystal! They will most certainly be cherished.