It turns out that if your fruit water product does not contain fruit you can’t show photographs of fruit in your ad or packaging or what have you.
But you can illustrate it. O-Happy day I have a lawyer to thank for a job. The client wanted a macro appetite appeal look to six different flavors of their fruit water ads.
I was asked to add the fire in this photo. It is next to impossible to photograph. I painted it entirely in painter, and then exported to photoshop.
EXPO asked me to create an idealized view of their markers. The design needed a precise control of light and shadow. This requiered the use of photgraphy as referance. But a lot more was needed to make this image work.
1. Establish a dynamic view of the product in use.
2. Using hand photo as a reference I painted over every aspect of it in Corel Painter.
3. Paint the window with graphic elements on separate layers.
Client comp. sketch below.
I made a trip to Savannah Georgia and was impressed at every turn. The public squares every 3 blocks or so with lovely live oak trees, victorian brick architecture, & magnolia trees. I have also admired Martin Heade’s Magnolia painting’s for sometime and thought I would try my hand at painting them.
When I was a kid the cough drop of choice was Smith Brothers wild cherry. Since then we have soothed our throats with many different brands, but I still remember the simple clean white box with the two guys on it.
This market segment has been flooded with candy image packaging that does not seem medicinal. The new packaging has an established (grownup) feel to it. Leveraging its history in this category was an important part of this project. My job was to update the brothers both in style and quality. No (final) art existed for the trademark, so I researched available images and got to work.
http://www.thesmithbrothers.com/
I designed some trees for a play production. I had a lot of help cutting leaves out of paper , and straitening coat hangers. Here are some photos of the work.
This is a shot of the stage.
It all starts with a drawing.
I have always thought pineapples were interesting, so being up against a deadline for an ad in workbook I chose a pineapple drawn from one my wife brought home from the store. But like most pineapples the proportions were a little outlandish for my use. So I took a little artistic license and tried to capture it’s essence rather than it’s literal shape.
The other elements in the painting were all exsisting images I had painted for past projects, and assembled in Corel Painter.
When I was a young concept artist at Source inc. in Chicago, we revered Joe Duffy’s work on Classico pasta sauce. In the world of maximum shelf impact pop, this design stood out for it’s beautiful illustrative design and muted color pallet. It certainly was a paragon of emotive package design.
Fast forward to 2003. I had the opportunity to work on one of my favorite brands. Lipson, Alport & Glass ask me to design imagery for 1 of 2 concepts being developed.
My concept was evolutionary in that it borrowed heavily on the past label art.
Here is the final label design. The Shelf pop zeitgeist finally caught up to the Classico brand, but L.A.G.A. wanted to keep the charming woodcut look. But in the final analysis the client wanted to move even farther away from where they were. O well, it still was a fun project.
Here is some of the development work that led to the final comp label.
In 2000 Hidden Valley needed a make over. I was asked to paint an idealized sun lit farm valley & sky, with (17) flavor icons. For 11 years the (valley) has defined the brand and ranch dressing in general.
This was a bit of work I did to show the development process I go through to paint an illustration. Just look at those old crts in my photo, and no gray hair ether.
I am thankful for the many things I learned with this project. It helped me define a style of illustration that was colorful, dramatic & appetizing. It also let me do a landscape inspired by Edwin Frederic Church. His work has given me a great love for landscape.
I have done a lot of Pringles illustrations, but this one was SMOKIN’.
My wife would always hold up a Celestial Seasonings tea package and say, “honey you should be doing work for them”. I would say, “yep, that would be the coolest”. Thank God He heard my prayer and they called me and said they had wanted to work with me for years. The opportunity came when they rebranded the package design and needed a less narrative and more flavor driven illustration.
The narrative part was still very much a part of the look they were after. Hibiscus is a main ingredient in the tea, so I came up with this hibiscus island concept. The background was to be universal to all of the flavors.
This was the first pencil drawing I did and simplified it a little in the final.
