Evaluation and Conclusion of Module 4 Wylam

My concept for the Wylam brief came from the company’s desire for a traditional design, based around their new Roman inspired ale. Carrying this Roman theme into my design, my initial idea was to have the Roman god of alcohol, Bacchus, surrounded by his followers - the Faunus, and Roman soldiers. They would be depicted as drinking beer and having a party in order to associate the drinking of this particular product with having fun. Additionally, I chose to try and tailor my illustrations to mimic the style of a spiral frieze, like that of Trajan's Column. This decision was made as the Column depicts an ancient Roman battle and is widely considered as one of the first examples of narrative illustration. This links in nicely with the concept and inspiration for the ale I have designed a label for, as it is not only Roman inspired but is based upon an ancient recipe for a ‘Battle Booster’ drink. This was intended to improve soldier moral and fighting prowess. By basing my design presentation on that of a spiral frieze I would be able to address Wylam’s desire for a more traditional design, by using more muted colours and adding greater detail. This is unlike many modern craft beer label designs as many incorporate more simplistic shapes and a limited colour palette of black or white, and 2-4 bright colours.
Part way through my project, however, I decided to cut the idea of Bacchus due to his relative uncommonness in the modern world. Additionally, the image of a morbidly obese man drinking alcohol (as he was traditionally most commonly portrayed) implies negative health implications from drinking the product. I instead decided to simply imply his presence through an image of the Roman soldiers and Faunus drinking and celebrating together. The font and style of illustration, I feel, maintained the required historical context throughout the image. It took a number of attempts to work on creating a convincing carved stone effect, and I believe that what I created was the best possible result. Unfortunately, due to the nature of this effect (very similar stone and character colours, only differentiated by shading)I feel that the characters may be a little lost to the background. However, overall I felt this sufficiently maintained the Roman theme that the brand is orientated around.
My initial concept was strong and gave me a very good basis from which to start working from. I believe that the final illustrations developed from my initial concept successfully reflect the conditions required for the brief. If I were to do the project again I think I would research different styles of Roman art, such as Mosaic, which would allow me to use brighter colours, and may also allow better framing of my illustrations on the label. I would like to have compared a design based upon alternative styles to my current final design in order to see which gave the product a greater impact upon the market.

WYLAM BREWERY: Finals

 I created all of the text in the same way. I used layer styles on plain black text to easily replicate the same style, I used times new roman text so it will easily be associated with rome.
I also used a free use stone texture from the lost and taken website, and edited the colours.

In my Concept i was originally going to draw my characters aswell as Bacchus drinking but i decided to remove Bacchus as i didn't want to feature a ridiculously overweight man on the beer label due to the common ideas of beer drinker being overweight.

 I started with plain black text.

 Then applied these layer styles so that it would look as though it was chiseled into stone.

 and ended up with this.

this is it after the layer styles were rasterised and it looks a bit more natural

 I used a 7% fill so that it looked shaded inside the text without it being solid black

Here is where I started layering up the design

 I created a little bar scene in the style of trajans column to fit the style, i tried making various layers and flourishes on the bar, but it distracted from the simple characters so instead i left it at two layers of detail in the end

 this was the original drawing that i applied effects to

 Here is my series of characters for the bottle, they are roman soldiers and Faunus, i explain this in previous blogposts

 this was the original sketch

 I isolated the characters like this to apply the layer styles

 I then cut out the characters and placed them over my bar scene

 This is my finished Label design

 I then created the bar clip using the same techniques

 I also created the circular bar clip

 i show the creation of these lines later on

 These are the layer styles that i applied to the lines in order to make it look as though they were sticking out instead of being carved in

WYLAM BREWERY: Sketchbook