I got the most amazing assignment: to make a hand-painted ketubah for my friends’ wedding! The ketubah is the traditional Jewish wedding document, which outlines the rights and responsibilities of the partners in their marriage. I had designed their invitation, and they wanted something leafy and green to match the tree on the invitation, but more intricate and viney. Since there is only one ketubah, it wouldn’t be letterpress printed like the invitations. It’s a sacred and special document, so we decided it made sense to hand-paint the border and hand-write the text. I designed everything on the computer, using my drawing tablet, and then printed it out and used the light-table to overlay a heavy watercolor paper and hand-paint the border. It was a really fun but intensely detailed and laborious process, and there’s really no way to erase or correct mistakes – I was kind of terrified that I would paint half of it and then spill a bottle of ink on it and have to start over! Amazingly, I did not mess up anything at all.
