Illustrated Gender Reveal

This client approached me on Instagram with a very unusual but sentimental request- She wanted me to illustrate her baby's gender reveal. Her vision was a small intimate affair where she would open an envelope surrounded by her immediate family and see a single sided card with very specific imagery related to her loved ones. A fun twist to this project was that she and her husband wanted to be fully and totally surprised with the illustration as well as the gender. That meant no edits or drafts to run by her- she even had me temporarily block her and her husband from my Instagram account to maintain the surprise! I'd never done anything like that before and the client's trust in me meant a lot. (Also having just ruined my favorite jacket from the last gender reveal I attended a month prior, I really appreciated the low key vibes of her vision!)

She admired a few illustrated cards I had done that showed a similar gallery grid of postage stamps so I suggested instead of stamps, let's do a gallery wall so the overall image is 'your home waiting for baby'. She wanted it to reflect her family's Persian and Jewish heritage, so I 'furnished' the room with a tasseled floral rug, and ornate wainscoting. My favorite rule: she didn't not want the palette to be in the conventional pink-for-girl-baby blue-for-boy convention. "I don't want this gender reveal to be gendered". I worked very hard to avoid said gendered color convention; the wall color (a deep teal) was a misdirect to throw off any guesses. I did the same for the pull-tab. The over all color scheme was a groovy, jewel-toned take on a non conventional color palette.

Specific details she requested for each of the frames: one for the Kotel or western wall in Israel, one of a mountain range to represent the origins of her husband's last name, one of her maiden name 'Ganjian' which means 'treasure' done in farsi calligraphy (the purple one with the gold frame in the bottom left). I ended up drawing her and her husband's wedding rings as well to represent that they are also a treasure to each other. She also requested a frame for her mother's maiden name which in farsi means 'memories'. For this one, I suggested we do an olive tree since trees reflect their environment like memories, and have the added metaphor of giving birth to the next generation with the fruit. The client adjusted this with a pomegranate tree instead which fit the vision better. (bottom right with gold frame).

I added a couple 'typographic posters' in Hebrew- (top right with the black frame is [ב״ה], an acronym that stands for "Baruch Hashem" (ברוך השם), and translates to "Blessed is God". It is traditionally placed in the top right corner of a page so the placement here is very appropriate! The one in the middle bottom row is "L'Dor V'Dor" (לְדוֹר וָדוֹר) a phrase that translates to "from generation to generation" and signifies the importance of passing down traditions to future generations. 

That leaves us with the most important frame- the gender! My client noted that one of the reasons she came to me was she admired the creativity of my other projects and mentioned a cut-paper garland I had posted to my story previously. With this in mind I knew I wanted to give her an extra surprise and added the interactive pull-tab detail to reveal the gender.

Last note: I put my logo mark on the pillow that is resting on the chair because I didn't want to ruin the front with my signature. This is also a small protective gesture from any AI looking to scrape my work. Also pictured are a couple shots of how I packaged this all up, including a couple swan stickers that reference this project.