How is your weather? Are you enjoying some hot summer days? (Hello, Southern Hemisphere readers! We love you, too—just bookmark this for 6 months from now!)

Today I have put together an invitation in Illustrator for you to download and use for a summer party! This project was pretty simple:

1. Set up my artboard to be about 3.7 x 8.5 inches (one third of a standard letter paper).
2. Drew a popsicle “head” freehand with the Pen Tool, and gave it a bright color. (I could have also brought in a real popsicle to trace, but I was happy with my freehand result.)
3. Drew a popsicle stick freehand with the Pen Tool. I gave it a light tan fill color. Then I drew two inner lines with the pen tool and gave them a darker tan stroke. I grouped the objects in my stick and sent it to the back. (The images shown in this post use a real popsicle stick, because you can print this project and glue it to a popsicle stick if you like! But if you’d rather not, there is a popsicle stick included as part of the graphic.)
4. Chose a font (Carolyna Pro Black — I’m a little hung up on this font lately and probably should switch to something else for a change…). I wrote out my message in a different text field for every line: hot / fun / in the / sum / mer / time.
5. Set the font color to white and arranged each word on my popsicle. This took a little adjustment and fiddling. I also chose different glyphs to help make the type fit perfectly. (If you don’t know about working with glyphs, Melanie Burk has a couple great video tutorials on working with glyphs: Glyphs with Simple Type and Adding Glyphs to a Simple Script.
6. Added a white background to my artboard and grouped everything. I did this to help me align things more precisely when the time came to set up for printing.
7. Made a quick copy of my artboard (shift O to edit my artboard, then I dragged right holding alt to make a copy and shift to keep it in line).
8. On the new artboard, I deleted all the text. I selected the whole group (including white background) and reflected with the reflection tool.
9. Swapped the fill and stroke on the popsicle so that the stroke was colored and the fill was empty. Aligned the stroke to the INSIDE of my object (which means that the stroke only appears inside of the path) and increased the stroke weight.
10. Added new text to this backside of the invitation.
11. Made a new document, and formatted to print. The white boxes in the background were helpful because I could align each group to the far left, middle, and far right of my artboard.

The instructions for printing this project are included with the download! It’s very simple, and prints on 8.5 x 11 card stock!

If you have any questions about the steps that I took to complete this project, please leave me a comment! And if you end up using this, I’d love to see pictures! You can upload a picture to our Facebook page (have you liked us yet?), or you could tag me if you post it to instagram! (@almaloveland)

As always, if you are interested in learning to do something like this, I recommend my Illustrator 101 and Pretty Paper Products classes!