A Sweet Trip to Birthdayland

My baby girl just turned three! We threw her a Candyland-themed birthday party and I have to tell you, I’m just tickled pink about it. Kids’ birthday parties are THE BEST! What a great excuse for tons of bright fun color and sweets galore… and exploring new avenues of creativity!

Since my daughter loves the Candyland board game, we decided to send her friends a smaller version of the board game as their invitation!

The printed invitation was designed on my iPad, along with the mailing labels, then mounted so it was floating in a mailer box. For extra fun, we included a colorful lollipop with a dainty bow.

How fun to design an invitation digitally! All of my custom invitation work to date has incorporated traditional artwork on paper, like pen-and-ink drawings or watercolors. It’s often time consuming to scan the artwork and clean it up in Photoshop in order to make a print-ready invitation. Designing on the iPad allowed me to skip that step, and illustrate in a cartoonish way that I’ve never done before.

I really wanted a candy cane font like they use on the Candyland board game, but couldn’t find one online… so I created each letter by hand.

My favorite parts are the little character representations of our family… the Lollipop Princess, Baby Gumdrop, King Chocolate Cherry, and Queen Frosting! (These are loosely based on the 1980s version of Candyland, but with some details changed to reflect our family.)

Even our house got the custom Candyland treatment.

How amazing is this cake from Sugar Mama’s Bake Shop? They nailed it!

A few friends sent photos or videos of their kids opening the invitation. It was awesome to see the joy and excitement on their faces! I’m sure it was the lollipop inside, not the carefully rendered digital depictions of our family… but I’ll take what I can get. ;)

The party itself was so fun, with a few activity stations where the kids could fill their goody bags.

I’m so grateful to have occasions like this to spark new creative pursuits.