The Making of a Ketubah

I love watching an art piece develop. In truth I always have an idea of how the piece will turn out, but the end result is always a little different than I expected. It's a real creative process.  Normally I don't like anyone seeing my artwork before it's completely finished but I decided to give you, my readers, an inside peek of the process of designing a ketubah from scratch.

It starts with a sketch:

I draw with pencil a detailed sketch of the design.  Once the sketch is mainly completed I start filling it in with ink, pencil and watercolor, my usual choices of medium.  The couple who ordered this ketubah were getting married at the New York Botanical Gardens and they wanted a lot of detail of flowers and that blue should be the predominate color.  We decided to add in images of doves and olive branches as symbols of peace and harmony and pomegranates as a symbol of prosperity.  In addition, their wedding was right before Rosh Hashana so the pomegranates worked well with the time of year. (Also I love pomegranates so whenever I can add them into pieces I do!)

I finished adding in all the color for the flowers, now it's time to paint the background blue and fill in the corners.

If you notice I had an olive tree originally sketched into one of the corners, but I didn't like the way it looked.  A closer up of the olive branch would be more visually appealing and balance out the close-up of the pomegranates. (Art is all about balance, and if you don't believe me read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, one of my favorite novels of all time!)  I also decided to add an extra border of floral papercut around the perimeter to give it that little extra wow factor!  And as you can see I've started spacing out the ketubah text.  I always save that for last since it's my least favorite part of designing a ketubah!

The finished product!

And of course no artwork is complete without the artist's signature.