OUTPUT
Mostly work for Cypher Brewing Co. this month and not too much for myself. I recognise this is something I have to keep an eye on, too many commissions and I can’t really keep motivated. But there were some really fun ones that I’m pretty proud of in this mix.
This one is meant to be a knock off of the excellent 90s movie with Brendan Fraser, Adam Sandler and Steve Buscemi. I illustrated two of my mates into it as well.
I think this one is my favourite beer can art I’ve done yet. It’s got some really interesting forms, textures and I love the colour palette. I did a bit of research into Greek mythology to figure out what imagery would fit and make sense, then had a great time hand lettering a new font style. I think it all came together really nicely.
This design was the exact opposite. Aaaabsolute dogshit, and pretty funny in hindsight. I stayed up way too late meeting deadlines for other art and just pushed this one through at the same time. At no point in the multiple hours it took to make this did I realise it was probably a bad idea to illustrate a car crash on a beer can. Fucking idiot haha. And it’s a terrible composition and colour palette on top of that as well. It’s great to have a second set of eyes look over your work before you get too deep into it.
But to be fair “Dream Collision” is a really difficult abstract kinda name to think of appropriate and catchy imagery for. Sure there’s a cosmic spacey vibe, but would that image have a focal point that can sit in the middle of a beer can? I tried and I can tell ya I couldn’t figure it out. In the end I bounced ideas of my partner and we decided that the only collision to safely illustrate is two schooners on a sunny day and this was the end result which is a faaair bit better than the first attempt.
I made a new carton design that’s pretty fun. The top is meant to be like a vintage bank vault door. The details in the design provide enough info to solve the cipher and unlock a hidden message. The design on the sides you can rotate so that they tesselate and make up a larger image when you stack them. Here’s my initial design and the little mockup I printed off and folded up to make sure I had the correct images on the right panels, and then how they turned out.
The last piece I finished this month was a collaboration with a talented Githabul artist Peter Lee. This is my first collaboration on a beer can and I think it turned out beautifully. You can read in the beer’s blurb what this project is about. Peter supplied some of his original work and I adapted it to fit a beer can template and updated some of the cricket symbols.
INPUT
This was a pretty hectic month for art as half of it I was bundled up in an airbnb share house situation interstate as my last nursing placement. It made me really grateful for the set up I have at home with my own tools and drawing board specifically but more generally just space for myself that isn’t just a pokey sweaty bedroom.
It was a good month for movies being spooky season and I used the local cinema as my treat to mark the end of the week and to recognise the work I was putting in. Here’s the top 3 movies I watched this month.
I need to watch all the directors other work for each of these movies. They were all so weird and wonderful with truly emotional performances that made me care about the characters. The wolf of snow hollow was especially impressive, as the director is one of the main characters and had a dark humour that was infectious.
You ever hear vocals that were so brutal they just sounded like two bricks scraping together? (wait until 3min26sec) A mate shared Tavern by Netherwalker with me and I couldn’t stop listening to it which I guess impacted my listening for this month to be quite heavy. Here’s two tracks that were on high rotation:
Pretty happy that I did a tonne of reading this month as I challenged myself to read 100 pages a day for 10 days in a row, which was actually really hard when you’re on your feet and out of the house either working or commuting to that work for 10 hours a day. Since the 10 days have finished I haven’t been hitting the same number of pages but I’ve definitely been more consistent with reading. Books I started or finished this month included: