Nomi and Adam - Part I

I came to live in Israel almost 20 years ago. I came alone (I met Mister Handmade in Israel here) and decided to study at an ulpan (an institute or school for the intensive study of Hebrew; the Hebrew word means studio or teaching, instruction). I hoped to learn Hebrew and to make some good friends. On my first day there I had to find a roommate. Nomi, who is from Australia, was next to me in the office queue. We decided that we liked the look of one another enough to share a room! Twenty years later we are still good friends. We have been through good times and bad. She travelled all the way to the UK for my wedding, and we have both hugged each other and cried on each others shoulders when we both lost parents in very similar circumstances. Twenty years is a long time!

Last summer Nomi excitedly called me to tell me that she was getting married! (Yeah, she took her time!). I really wanted to be involved and help her as much as I could and so, when she emailed me and said that she and her husband-to-be, Adam, were deciding on invitations, of course I agreed to work on them. My own son's Bar Mitzvah invitation was still on Nomi's fridge door and she said that it just jumped out at her. She and Adam wanted something similar.

Nomi and Adam requested a picture of themselves on their invitation. They wanted to show the bride in her wedding dress, next to the groom in his wedding suit. They shared a lot of "secret" information with me before their big day, so I knew that the groom would be wearing a dark blue single breasted suit with a white shirt and a sky blue tie. He wanted a white flower in the button hole of the left lapel of his jacket. They wanted the bride to be holding a round bouquet of pink flowers and suggested that I show her beautiful engagement ring too. Unfortunately that got hidden by the flowers in my illustration, but they forgave me for that.

We discussed the fact that both the bride and groom are roughly the same height. I tried to capture the "quiff" of Adam's hair, and his slightly ginger facial hair. I matched his blue eyes to her brown. Nomi's hair is curly. I was told that she would be wearing it down on the big day, and that she would have a shoulder length veil and a sleeveless dress. Now, you can see from the photograph of the lovely couple that I didn't get those thing exactly right, but a white wedding dress was deemed close enough.

When Nomi met Adam she also met Niv. Niv is a big black Labrador mix and is very much part of the family. They definitely wanted me to include him on the invitation. We discussed Niv's shape (apparently I flattered him), the colour of his eyes, and his brown collar and silver metal tag in the shape of a bone. He ended up looking very handsome on the wedding invitation.

As I have already mentioned, Nomi is from Australia. Adam is from the UK. So, whilst Nomi is holding her bouquet of flowers, Adam can be seen waving a Union Jack and an Australian flag. Theirs was a real Commonwealth union!

When Adam received my initial sketch he wrote "This is really lovely. It made me smile from ear to ear." A great start! I am going to show you all the wedding stationery in my next post, but I can tell you that they loved their invitations, created from this artwork. They were thrilled with my attention to detail, and were very excited to be sending them out. "Thank you for everything you've done." Adam wrote. "You've already made the day special and I love that your fabulous work is such a part of our wedding."