Invitations: Year of the Dragon Chinese Banquet

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All parties start with an invitation! These ones didn’t get printed off but emailed instead. As always, I worked in Paintshop Pro X2 (PSPX2) and started with a red background. I created a gradient with yellow and orange to give a gold colour and used that throughout for the lettering and graphics. I added a thin gold border, followed by a dragon in the bottom right corner. For the dragon, I found an image online which I converted into a brush to use. I used three different fonts – all free that I found online called ‘Shanghai‘, ‘jsa lovechinese‘ and ‘Far East‘. All come from dafont.com which is a great, free font site that I use often. I add things on a new layer for each element so I could move things about freely until I was happy with layout. At this point I then merged all the layers, except for the red background and applied a dark drop shadow to all the gold elements to make them stand out. I loved how they turned out, and it gave me a starting point for the rest of the things I would be designing and printing – name place labels and the menu.

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