Bold as Love! A Colorful NYC Engagement Shoot

We’re here today to infuse a bit of color + joy into your Thursday! Rachel Mae Smith – crafter, blogger, and author behind The Crafted Life – found her match in Ryan, and these two complement each other more orange + blue! Yes, we’re making color jokes but that’s just because we’re giddy with happiness over Rachel + Ryan’s fun NYC engagement shoot! Can you blame us?

From Rachel: New York is stereotypically dark and grey, but we don’t see the city like that at all. For us, it’s full of life, happy memories, and it’s the place where we fell in love! So we wanted our engagement shoot to feel exactly like that.

Who better to call on than the color queen herself, Mary Costa?! Mary met the couple around 6 am at Washington Square Park to avoid the crowds, then wandered around New York’s most vivid alcoves—from Gay Street to the Color Factory murals.

Let’s have a look and learn a little more about Rachel + Ryan’s fun love story!

True Colors

Tell us how you met!

Tinder! I was living in Philly at the time and he was in NYC. He was in town for a weekend visiting some of his friends and we matched. We had our first date at the Whitney in NYC and were long distance for a year before moving to Brooklyn together.

Mellow Yellow

How did Ryan propose?

It was a Friday night in March and we were walking to dinner. Funny enough, I’d texted friends earlier in the day thinking that he was going to do it because Ryan found the restaurant and made a reservation, which is something I typically do. Clearly, something was up!

As we’re walking to dinner, Ryan tells me he’s not feeling well. I tell him it’s no big deal, we’ll just cancel dinner and head home. He says the fresh air is helping and wants to keep walking. We ended up at the park by our house walked in. There’s a slight incline in the park and it was cold outside, so I’m thinking, “What sick person wants to walk up a hill? This is it, isn’t it?!”

Once we got to the top we could see the Manhattan skyline and the Empire State Building lit up pink for International Women’s Day. He pulls out his phone and started playing our song then got down on one knee and asked. AND DUH I SAID YES!!!

We left the park, went to a restaurant we’ve been to and loved before, had a nice meal and champagne. It was perfect.