Creating Beautiful, Unique Envelopes

1. Introduction: Hi, everyone. Welcome to you creating beautiful unique envelopes. I'm Laney Schenk , a calligrapher and stationary designer, and also the creator of the No More Boring Envelopes project on Instagram. We are looking to spice up your snail mail one envelope at a time. So in this course, we're going to teach you the ins and outs of creating one-of-a-kind unique envelopes that will wow your friends and family before they even see what's inside. Don't worry, you don't have to have any special artistic or calligraphy skills. Although, I know there are a ton of courses here in Skillshare to help you develop those as well. I challenge you today to think outside of the mailbox and take your creativity to a place it's probably never gone before. So let's get started. 2. Our Favorite Supplies: Supply list for this project could be pretty much endless, but there are a few things that we especially love. We've linked them all directly in the supplies page below. Of course, you'll need envelopes, and we like to spread out our designs, we work with A7 envelopes or larger usually. These are five and a quarter by seven and a quarter inches and a fit a five by seven card in them. Bigger envelopes will work best, we've linked our favorite supplier that all these envelopes came from. They have a huge selection of colors and you can purchase in whatever quantities you want. You can also make your own envelopes out of scrapbook paper like we've done with this sky using a punch board like this one, also linked below. I'll use a pencil and kneaded eraser for laying out our designs. We use a laser level purchased from a hardware store to get straight lines, you could also use a ruler, of course. Printing envelopes can be tricky and we'll touch on it a little bit below using our favorite printer, which is called the Canon Pixma Pro-100. You can use whatever materials you are comfortable with for the addressing artistic portion of the design. We'll be using this feud pen and this sign pen torch, we'll also be using a speed ball nib holder with the browse Steno nib, a few different calligraphy inks that we'll talk about. Windsor and professional watercolor paints and our favorite Martha Stewart acrylic craft paints, which you can get at my goals. You can also add in anything else you like, wax seals, feathers, gold leaf, markers, gel pens, crayons, needle point, glitter, you name it. The supply list is pretty much endless for this project. 3. Mailing Rules and Postage: We've said that the sky is the limit for your envelopes, but in truth the USPS regulations are the limit. You obviously, want your envelopes to actually arrive at their destination, you will have to work within their perimeters. Make sure you leave enough room for appropriate postage at the top, especially if you're using a variety of stamps. Postage can technically go anywhere in the top right corner of the envelope. You can think about incorporating that into your design in a unique way, such as we've done here. Your addressing should be as legible as possible, this is more important for the actual address itself than it is for the names, so we often mix and match print and script fonts for fun. Red ink is illegible to the USPS machines, so avoid that, and in general, you'll want your ink to be contrasting with whatever color envelope it's on. Check out the USPS website for the full guidelines, but we'll go over a few of the addressing rules. It doesn't actually matter if you spell out things like street or drive. The ZIP code can either go on the same line as the city and state or on it's own line as we've done here, which can be fun design wise. You should also include a return address, so think about how that will play into your design. We typically include ours on the flap of the envelope to leave the entire front free for our fun layouts. Of course, you might want to know about postage and stamps. You can always use regular old, forever stamps from the post office. Most envelopes only require one stamp or $0.55 postage as of April 2019. If your envelope will be over one ounce in weight, and unusual or large size, or bulky due to extra papers, wax seals, ribbon, tie, etc, then you may need to add 15 or $0.30 more. All post offices will give you slightly different rules, so we do recommend checking with your local one before mailing to be sure. You may want to find unique stamps to go with your design or even incorporate your stance interior design as we've done here. Our favorite places to purchase vintage stamps are on eBay and Etsy. If you have your eye on a forever stamp like this one that's no longer in production, chances are you can find that on Amazon. To keep your envelopes looking a little more pristine in the mail, you can ask your post-office if you can hand cancel all your stamps to avoid sending them through one of the machines. Now, that we've covered the logistics, let's chat design for your envelope. 4. Picking Your Theme: Taking an overarching vision or theme for your envelopes will help keep you focused. For instance, I designed this envelope after asking myself, what in the world would King Midas's envelopes look like? A question that no one ever really needed the answer to, until we actually saw it [LAUGHTER] [NOISE]. A lot of the contributors to our hashtag, no more boring envelopes project on Instagram, create envelopes based on their favorite TV shows, movies, animals, foods, etc , such as this Harry Potter themed envelope by Continent Cursive, or this lemon themed envelope by Curated Confection. You could base your theme often on an event, if you're sending out invitations like this, stuck the bar invitation and envelope by Hannyiloudesigns, and of course you don't need to have an official theme, but you could just have an idea of the overall feel you want for your envelopes, like this gorgeous floral number from designhouseofmoira, to pick your theme, you can always use Pinterest for ideas, search hashtag, no more boring envelopes on Instagram for some inspiration, and of course, start with thinking about what's going inside the envelope. Events, a card for a particular holiday, for instance, maybe start with that as an idea and see what inspiration grows. 5. Simple Designs to Try: Now, you've seen a lot of different things here. We've got watercolor, we've got acrylic painting, printing, calligraphy, gold leafing, but you don't actually have to have a world of painting or drawing experience to make something really fun. We have a few tricks up our sleeves that we bring out when we're feeling stuck. Try these out in different materials, colors, combinations, and layout, and you'll be amazed at how many combos you can actually come up with. First off, we have splatter, this is a classic and what first brought me into the non-boring envelope world. You'll just dip your brush into the ink or paint and then use your finger to well, splat it all over the place. I like to use a frame or a cascading effect with this, just be prepared that it's going get a little messy. Then we've got stripes they're, classic for a reason or of course, variation on stripes. They work really well on envelopes because they're rectangular. You can go horizontal, vertically. You can even go diagonally or somewhere in between or combine a few different types of stripes. Dots are a similar idea, am a huge poker dot fun, you can play with messier dots or dobs of paint, more like blobs, or you could keep it a little bit simpler and more classic. A framing effect adds a lot without a ton of effort. We like to frame the whole envelope with design elements and leave the middle open for the address, or you could just frame the stamp, which is really unique and fund like this. Now, it's time to get creative for our example, we're going to incorporate some loose watercolor flowers like this, but make sure you follow along with your own designs in mind. 6. Laying Out Your Design: let's start laying out the design. First of all, You're going to mark off the area that you need for stamps. I always love including a neat combo. I've chosen these colorful ones. I think I will lay them out like this. Let's mark that area, lightly in a pencil. Now I want to make an approximate reference for where our address will go. We always start from the bottom of the zip code and draw anywhere from 4-6 lines depending on your address needs. If you're creating a lot of envelopes, you may want to make a guide. What you do, just place your envelope on a larger piece of paper that you likely want to tape down. Then we'll trace our corners so we know where the envelope goes. Then we'll use a ruler or laser level to draw out each one. You want to go all the way out of the address of the envelope so that when you put it back in here, You can see your guides here and use them to direct you. You can also draw a line down the center to help you with centering all of your addresses. We're just doing this one. The good thing about this particular design is that the flowers will actually frame whatever alignment we choose so we don't need to worry about perfectly centering, even left or right aligning. We're going to start at the bottom, go half an inch up, then each line will be three-quarters of an inch above that, but we only need four lines. Once you've got your lines, you can go ahead and lay out your entire address. We like to have fun with the names. Once your address is in, you can add in the rest of the designs. Since we're doing loose fluorophores, we won't draw that out too much but we can go ahead and recognize that that will fit in these general areas. You could also start with the design portion and fill in the address second of course. For instance, maybe I want to paint a little bike on my envelope. I'll start by sketching that out as you've done here, then fill in the address where it fits, over to the side because we are more limited by that particular design. Now we just fill it in. I'm a much better calligrapher than I am a painter, so I'm going to start with my fluorophores. I am using Wins or Newton professional-grade watercolors in my very messy palette over here. I'm going to put this piece paper down. I'll just start in the corner. Now there are a lot of gray watercolor tutorials here on Skillshare for you. I'm not a pro at it by any means, but it's fun. These lists files are really simple. Then of course, we'll draw some leaves in here. There we go. Once that dries you are ready to add your address. We'll show you a few different ways but our first couple are going to be in calligraphy as our specialty. This first one is going to be using a sprout steno nib with a speed ball straight holder and a custom mixed Greg wash for ink. Once we're finished addressing this envelope we'll set it aside and show you a couple of different methods for addressing. This envelope. I am using dipping calligraphy with Dr. Martin, Sleep roof, White ink, My favorite of all time. We've got a rate justification over here and I'll do a little mix and match. If you're not familiar with dipping calligraphy you can always use brush pens as a great alternative. These few pens are my favorites. Sorry, I'm left-handed here everybody. You can also create something beautiful with a simple gel pen like this unit ball signal or even a regular old marker. Whatever materials you are comfortable with, you can use to create something that's going to turn out beautiful and really wild your friends when they receive them in the mail. 7. Printing Your Design: If you're creating a lot of envelopes for a party or wedding invitation, for instance, you may want to print them out or have them printed. It can be tricky, but can also provide gorgeous results like these, which were all printed, at least in part. Our printer is the Canon Pixma Pro 100 , but you can have envelopes printed at a local print shop as well. We design envelopes to be printed with the flaps open, which is fun because you can print over the flap designs such as these. We also love creating mix and match designs where the addresses print in, but the names are handwritten like this to add a little bit of fun. We always design with the full size of the envelope, with the flap open in Illustrator or Photoshop and print using the envelope paper tight and typically the fast setting here. We won't go into this too much here, but if you want to print a lot of different addresses from an Excel sheet, we do have a tutorial on how to do that link in the resources section. Printing is the difficult piece in and of itself. We'll just leave you with these small tips today and focus on creating envelopes with art done by hand. We can't wait to see what you create for your class project. 8. Your Class Project: For your class project, you'll create your own beautiful, unique envelope design. Use whatever artistic skills come naturally to you, whether that's calligraphy and lettering, painting, drawing, or even mixed media. I encourage you to think outside of the mailbox and pick a theme that resonates with you or the piece that you plan to mail or even the recipient. For instance, if your mailing a birthday card, consider a present or cake theme or maybe focus on the birthday girl's favorite things. Make sure you share a photo of your class project by uploading it to this course and then your final assignment is the most important, put some stamps on it and send it off into the world. We hope you've enjoyed this class and we've helped you step up your snail mail game a little bit. Here we just see everything that you create and please let us know if you have any questions in the comments below.