WYLAM BREWERY: Faunus Research

In ancient Roman religion and myth, Faunus was the horned god of the forest, plains and fields; when he made cattle fertile he was called Inuus. He came to be equated in literature with the Greek god Pan.
As Pan was accompanied by the Paniskoi, or little Pans, so the existence of many Fauni was assumed besides the chief Faunus.
Romans connected their fauns with the Greek satyrs, who were wild and orgiastic drunken followers of Dionysus, who is the greek equivalent of Bacchus.

WYLAM BREWERY: Trajan's Column

"Trajan's Column (Italian: Colonna Traiana) is a Roman triumphal column in Rome, Italy, that commemorates Roman emperor Trajan's victory in the Dacian Wars. It was probably constructed under the supervision of the architect Apollodorus of Damascus at the order of the Roman Senate. It is located in Trajan's Forum, built near the Quirinal Hill, north of the Roman Forum. Completed in AD 113, the freestanding column is most famous for its spiral bas relief, which artistically describes the epic wars between the Romans and Dacians (101–102 and 105–106). Its design has inspired numerous victory columns, both ancient and modern."

WYLAM BREWERY: My Concept

My concept for the Wylam brief is to have Bacchus the roman god of drinking, surrounded by his followers, the Faunus, and Roman soldiers drinking beer and having a party. Illustrated in the style of a spiral frieze like that of Trajan's Column. I've decided to do this because the Wylam beer that I am designing the label for, is roman inspired and based on the Ancient Roman recipe for a 'Battle Booster' to improve soldiers moral and fighting prowess. With that in mind i've decided to focus on the Deity Bacchus and his followers the Faunus' who were beloved gods in the times.

The reason I decided to illustrate the label in a traditional Trajan Column style is because I feel its more fitting with the history of the drink, I believe this concept will be interesting to develop because when the roman soldiers drank they believed they had the spirt of the gods with them. Bacchus's wine of courage, was believed to be a gift from Bacchus, which in fact was just intoxication.

WYLAM BREWERY: Drinking in Rome

Though beer was drunk in Ancient Rome, it was replaced in popularity by wine. Tacitus wrote disparagingly of the beer brewed by the Germanic peoples of his day.
Upper class Romans did not drink beer. It cost half the price of bad wine and consequently, was not for the sophisticated. In Italy and Gaul beer was made from rye. The Spaniards discovered how beer could be kept under pressure, which was when it acquired a foamy head. Pliny valued the foam for the yeast it contained. Beer-foam is used by women for cosmetic purposes.

"Bacchus was the Roman god of agriculture and wine, similar to the Greek Dionysus. He was the last god to join the twelve Olympians; Hestia gave up her seat for him. His plants were vines and twirling0 ivy. He often carried a pinecone-topped staff, and his followers were goat-footed Satyrs and Maenads, wild women who danced energetically during his festivals."

"In ancient Roman religion and myth, Faunus was the horned god of the forest, plains and fields; when he made cattle fertile he was called Inuus. He came to be equated in literature with the Greek god Pan."

WYLAM BREWERY: Brewery Research

Here I have looked in to some other breweries some local to the north east, and their packaging.

http://sonnet43.com
http://sixpoint.com

http://rudgatebrewery.co.uk

http://flyingdogbrewery.com

http://camdentownbrewery.com

WYLAM BREWERY: 'Chara'

"During the Roman Empire caraway seeds were blended with milk to form the ‘Chara’ of Julius Ceasar, eaten by the soldiers of Valerius as a battle booster."

The plant is similar in appearance to other members of the carrot family, with finely divided, feathery leaves with thread-like divisions, growing on 20–30 cm stems. The main flower stem is 40–60 cm tall, with small white or pink flowers in umbels. Caraway fruits (erroneously called seeds) are crescent-shaped achenes, around 2 mm long, with five pale ridges.

Julius Caesar’s army ate a bread made of caraway root (chara). During the middle ages the use of caraway spread up from the Arabian pensinsula and into Northern Europe. Old herbal legends describe caraway’s power to keep things from getting lost or stolen. It was used in an ancient love potion, and it was also believed that if you tucked some into your possesions they would be protected from theft. As well it is known to be attractive to fowl and is used to keep chickens and pigeons from straying

WYLAM BREWERY: Initial Research

http://wylambrewery.co.uk

PROPER BEER FOR PROPER PEOPLE!

I have chosen to do the Wylam Brewery brief due to my passion and history of graphic design, I want to take this brief in a different direction than most of my other works, and I want to create something that could be commercially viable branding.

Wylam brewery was established in 2000 by Robin Leighton (deceased) and John Boyle, two people who shared a passion for real Ale.

All of their current work has a very similar style, though the brief says that they are working on re branding, so I won't have to follow a house style of any sort, which is good for me as i don't think my work would fit the current motif.

Current Designs

JUNGLE: Final Conclusion

Whilst listening to the album, and looking in to interviews, I began to draw an image of Tom and Josh from Jungle, this was the only image I could find of them, this drawing later became my editorial image. Along with this drawing I also drew a few of the people from the video's, mainly focusing on the video "The Heat", which features two men on roller-blades dancing in what looks to be a dilapidated warehouse.

At this point I had came up with my initial idea, I explain this further in my post on Concept. So I began drawing buildings, and practising how to make them look dilapidated, I also started looking at books on jungles, and drawing the plants from that.

Part way through drawing the buildings and characters I drew an image of a man covered in vines, this image would become the left character on my album cover. Around this time I changed my concept, when listening to the album and looking through my sketchbook, I really felt that nothing I had drawn fit well with the music, except for the vine man. All of the crumbling buildings really didn't feel happy, yet listening to the music, it's upbeat and atmospheric.

I really wanted to go forward with my vine man image, as I thought that it reflected the band perfectly, obscuring their identities was a focus through this project, as during an interview they said they didn't want to become vain, they wanted their musical careers to be about the music, and not about themselves.
I took my vine man drawing digital using the cintiq, and when happy with that, I sketched the second man and took that digitally aswell.

After completing the album cover and using a template to print, I got the idea of a box for my product. You can see the production of my box on my Product process post. I wanted to make the packaging of the CD have a mysterious jungle vibe in a literal sense, and I thought that I could successfully achieve the feel of this product through my love of woodworking.

JUNGLE: Editorial Image Process

When researching initially for Jungle, I found an interview with a photo of Josh and Thomas, with a picture attached. In this picture they were stood like this, and it looked as though Josh was mad at Thomas, this was the first drawing I did of Jungle, and I think it is appropriate to use it again, i brought it digital using the Cintiq.

JUNGLE: Poster Image Process

The conceot behind my album poster was to make it look as though the album was laying in an urban setting with the shadows of a canopy over top, and a snake out of view

 I started with a few effects on the album cover itself, first I applied a gradient, so that it wouldn't look so flat, I then applied a drop shadow so that it would look like an object.

 I drew out some leaves of a canopy roughly, and applied a Gaussian blur

 Here i started on the snake with a base of white

 I then added some pattern

 The lines are for perspective refference

 Here i started drawing out the scales, i then realised that this was tedious and wouldn't look very effective, so i tried something else

 I took an image of a grid

 warped it

and used that to create a selection of black within the grid

 I used the refine edge tool to round out the harsh squares

 I then used bevel and emboss tools, and applied the patter as an overlay over the base snake colours

 Ithen began to add some shading using pure black and white, and Gaussian blur

 Further detailing

 The snake didn't look very lusterous, so i added lots of white specks and blurred them to add a little bit more shine around the edge and along the spine of the snake, I also added a photograph that i took for the background image

 Final adjustments, such as hue and saturation, aswell as a dark Vignette