Hi - well I said I would bring you another whisky project which I had the privilege of working on earlier this year, and here it is - label and packaging art for Yula 20 year old malt whisky from Douglas Laing's distillery on the Isle of Islay.
This was another black and white line commission from the designers at Pocket Rocket Creative up in Stirling, but unlike 'The Devil's Punchbowl' and 'Angels' Nectar' this wasn't to be a scraperboard illustration. Instead it was to be just ink line, incorporating a lot of pattern and interlocking elements to tell the story of Yula and how the island of Islay came to be.
Yula was said to be a Danish princess, and she left her homeland to travel across the sea. With her she took many pebbles, all of different sizes, in the pockets of her apron, and on the journey these pebbles fell out into the sea and they each became an island, and ultimately one of them became the island of Islay. Unfortunately Yula then perished in soft sands on the coast and was taken to a sacred spot and buried there....... So even in that short synopsis there is plenty of imagery to play with, but also I was asked to incorporate a few items specific to Islay and to whisky production, so I had even more things to interweave into my drawing.
As is usual I started with a rough to fix elements in place and to discuss with the designer and client, and this led to a very detailed tracing, of which this is a detail:
Happily that proved to be quite acceptable to one and all, so it just became a matter of carefully tracing it down onto some nice hot-pressed heavy-weight watercolour paper, and then got my technical pens out and began inking it in....
It was quite mesmerising and very therapeutic just spending hours and hours filling almost the whole image with lines and dots. With my headphones on listening to music I was as happy as a pig in muck, I can tell you.
The aimed-for effect was to get a good overall tone, so that it looks quite grey from a distance, but then Yula's skin and her apron are clear in their milky whiteness by contrast.
I am hoping that this won't be the only time I work like this, but meanwhile the idea of surface pattern is creeping more and more into my other styles of work, particularly the oil painting I think. In fact, in the Three Angels paintings, although there isn't the abstract patterning, there are a few stars that recurred there from here.
Anyhow, this was the final full image, and at the top of the page is the finished thing.
I will just leave you with the separate image of Yula which is the bottle label :-)
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