Well, it’s one way to stop your toddlers scribbling on the wall. Angelina Jolie has revealed that she married Brad Pitt in a couture wedding dress covered in drawings by her own children.

In the first published images of the couple’s August wedding in the south of France, Jolie wears a custom-designed ivory dress designed by Donatella Versace, featuring elegant spaghetti straps and a ruched bodice.

But the back view reveals a surprising addition: a veil and train scattered with multi-coloured doodles drawn by Jolie and Pitt’s six children.

Pitt wore a suit he already owned in what the couple described to People magazine as a “fun and relaxed” day.

And their 10-year-old son, Pax, baked the wedding cake.

Donatella Versace has tweeted an image of the dress, which she designed especially for Jolie, congratulating the actor. The drawings by sons Maddox, 13 and Pax, daughters Zahara and Shiloh, nine and eight, and six-year-old twins Vivienne and Knox were embroidered by Luigi Massi of Atelier Versace.

“Luigi is like family to me and I couldn’t imagine anyone else making this dress,” Jolie told People magazine. “He knows and cares for the children and it was great fun putting it together.”

Pitt said of the wedding day itself: “It was such a special day to share with our children and a very happy time for our family.”

The couple pair first met when they played husband and wife assassins in the 2005 film, Mr and Mrs Smith. This is Pitt’s second wedding after a five-year marriage to Jennifer Aniston, and Jolie’s third after marriages to actors Johnny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton.

Their wedding bands were created by Robert Procop, who designed Jolie’s engagement ring when Pitt proposed in 2012. “We’re getting a lot of pressure from the kids,” Pitt said in an interview at the time. “We didn’t realise how much it meant to them and then, in getting engaged, how much it also means to us.”

Jolie’s dress is already dividing opinion on social networks, where she is no stranger to sartorial scrutiny. A black gown she wore slashed to the thigh at the 2012 Academy awards spawned its own Twitter account, Angelina’s Jolie’s Leg and an internet wide meme. During her marriage to Thornton, the pair wore necklaces containing vials of each other’s blood.

One commentator has labelled the Pitt and Jolie wedding “normcore” by comparison. Whether or not that is an accurate description, Jolie’s choice of dress is not “very trad” as early rumours suggested.

• This article was amended on 2 September 2014, as the dress designer was incorrectly credited to Atelier Versace rather than Donatella Versace