A Thousand Years

A short while ago a family friend commissioned me to do a painting for her as a gift for her husband, to give to him on their wedding day in November.
She requested that the picture was based on this original image:

However she also wanted some text from the song which will play for their 'first dance' (Christina Perri's 'A Thousand Years') and she asked for the couple in the image to resemble her and her fiance.

I made sure to gather any information about the requirements of the piece, including its size, typography (traditional or digitally added), photographs for reference of the couple etc.

Firstly I played with the saturation, hue and overall colouring of the image on Photoshop. I was against using only black and white since I felt it seemed too 'cold', plus I had a desire to use watercolour. I settled with a purplish-pink overlay which I felt worked well since it was quite soft and not too bold.

I then experimented with the watercolours and how the text would be added, and produced some samples to work out the best approach to achieve the effect I wanted.

Above is a sample where I experimented with a soft combination of blues, pinks and purples, along with a sprinkling of salt to create a snowflake effect. I thought the texture worked quite well so was happy with this discovery. (From my other samples I discovered that using a wax layer of the lettering before applying watercolour, and then using white colour pencil (with purple for shadows) on top of the watercolour was the best way to create the text that would stand out well but not detract attention from the background image.)

This is the finished piece:

Both myself and the recipient are very happy with the final result, and I enjoyed the progress of creating it.