dawn of the dinosaurs

We just had to have a dinosaur themed party for my son Oliver’s 5th birthday, the boy is mad on dinosaurs! So that meant dinosaur invitations to design, dinosaur party bags to make and fill with dino goodies; and fun dinosaur games and activities to plan!

As his birthday is in August the party was in the summer holiday so invitations had to be given out well in advance, before the end of term.
I commissioned some dinosaur illustrations from my talented artistic partner, Karl. I wanted five dinosaurs ’cause it was his 5th birthday.
The boy’s fave dinosaurs at the time were T-Rex, Spinosaurus and Brachiosaurus so they had to feature. My personal favourite dino is Stegosaurus and Triceratops seemed the obvious fifth.

Karl did rough sketches of the dinosaurs (he didn’t get to refine and paint them – much to his disappointment) which I scanned in to the Mac ready for tracing. I knew I needed to vectorise these as I already had ideas forming for other things I wanted to do with them. So I traced them into vector outlines in Illustrator and then coloured them up ready to be used on the invitations.