It has been a busy year, and the work has been nicely diverse. This post is about the creation of a new whisky label, a job which I undertook in June - another commission from the Pocket Rocket Creative team in Scotland who also had me work on 'The Devil's Punchbowl III' packaging which I wrote about in august last year here
So - from Devil to Angels - both my favourites!! The idea behind this theme is related to the small amount of spirit which evaporates away from the casks as the whisky matures, and which is known wistfully as the angels' share - and naturally the angels have found this particular blend a favourite, and so it is their nectar :-)
Gary at Pocket Rocket contacted me and discussed the sort of image they were after, and provided a rough he had created to sell the idea to his client. What he wanted was an angel made up of lots of smaller angels, and these smaller angels would be sipping whisky from tumblers! Ok, great I thought, sounds like a challenge, especially as the required scraperboard illustration would have to have fairly robust lines to be able to withstand being reduced down and ultimately to be printed using a gold foil.
It was this need for robustness of line that initially threw me off the basic concept as I struggled to see how I could achieve so many figures in such a small space. Of course I could just do the illustration huge and pack it with detail, and that would be great until it was reduced to label size (the final label on the finished bottle has an angel with a wingspan of only 6cm and an overall height of 7cm - pretty small!). So, I decided I should work at a maximum of 200% final size. And working at that scale made me realise how small the individual angels would be. So my first sketches made me wonder if it would be better to have fewer angels but with the rest of the form of the main angel to be created somehow out of evaporating whisky swirls. This was a working drawing at that early stage....I knew I was going away from the brief, but sometimes I just have to get something out of my system before I can get to where I need to be with a job:
I even made a partial line image to show how this might work out in scraperboard
But, quite rightly, Gary reeled me back in and gave me a pep talk and I increased the number of small angels making up the main angel figure, while reducing the vaporous swirls, ending up with this sketch which was given a tentative thumbs up, there were a couple more tweaks needed, but mostly it was there:
Then it was just a matter of transferring that to a blank sheet of scraperboard, adding black ink and then scratching off what wasn't needed until the whole thing was done. The head didn't quite work the first time I worked it, and so a new one was done on a separate board - scraperboard doesn't take to re-inking once you have scratched into the chalky layer once...
That one had hair which was too fine for the foil treatment, and so was revisited again when I composed the finished artwork in photoshop, and so after much to-ing and fro-ing, we got there, and I sent the work off:
I would have liked to have written about it at the time, but patience is a virtue they tell me, and I waited until now, which is good as I can link you to an image of the final product here, and even better, tell you that last month it won an award at the Scottish Creative awards - for Best Illustration - I can't really ask for more than that can I?
I hope you like it! I will be back to tell you about another whisky project soon TTFN :-)
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