Fun custom invitations

I was approached by a client seeking unique & fun invitations for her father's retirement party, in a small quantity (25). She was looking for a tongue-in-cheek tribute to her father's years of work, between law enforcement and a famous food manufacturer. Although it took hours of brainstorming, back & forth, sketching & illustration, and of course, the printing, I'm very proud of the final result. Thirteen hours, three plates, three colors and some hand cropping later we arrived at some beautiful invites. These invitations were printed on Crane's 110# Lettra paper with matching envelopes in Natural White. As a note, I've used dummy text for the illustration and blacked out the names, dates & places on the photographed final.

The illustration was done using a photograph I took of a can of tomato soup. It is paired with some Helvetica Black I mapped around a (3-D) cylinder in Illustrator and then traced by hand (for the "Bureau Shapes") and hand-drawn icon noodle shapes for the fedora, badge & gun. Text around the outside is dummy text but layout is the same as in the project.

Close up of the finished product. In the original Illustrator file I tried hard to make the text on the can look sketchy, but in the finished product it ends up with a more refined smooth look.

Another close up. Note the trapping I used to make sure all the colors overlap with no white showing. It's much more noticeable in this picture than it is with the final product in your hands.

The whole final product. I did black out the information along the edge but the text of the invitation runs around the outside black border in white (much like the illustration).