Wine Label Proposal Project

A new project has come up, and it's going to be a good one! Over the course of the next few weeks I will be working on 2 wine label concepts for 5th Road Estate Wines. The owners of this company will be choosing the labels they will print from a variety of artist and I hope that my pieces will be among those selected.

For the first label the clients have asked for a 'traditional' composition. In the past this meant classic vineyard scenes painted in traditional mediums, but the clients also expressed that isn't exactly what they want. With my concept I believe I've captured 'traditional' without being usual or common.
The second concept needs to be 'sexy'. The clients have a secondary line of wines that is mostly shipped to Las Vegas. These labels will incorporate a word representing 'sexy', and are to be
classy not trashy!

So to start, as always, it began with ideas -- here are my thumbnails. I wanted an image or images that related to wine, but stayed away from any form of landscape scene. For the 'traditional' label I went with the Wine Barrel concept shown here in the middle of the top row.

For the 'sexy' label I'm going to use the grape-stomp concept (2nd row, far right) and incorporate the word 'Strut..."

I also wanted to incorporate wine itself so I used it as my medium. I painted with a watercolour style, but used a Merlot wine.

I deliniated my image area onto watercolour paper then started by scattering wine drops on the page. I used a large brush and over-saturated it with the wine so that I could let it naturally drop onto the page without any help from me.

Next, I didn't like the contrast of the spots against the white of the paper so I began to lightly lay a wash of wine on top of the entire area.

Now I switched to a thinner brush and painted in the detail of the barrel. I started with the wood grain then moved to shadows and the spout.












I let this dry over night the scanned it into
my computer.

As per usual, I then colour corrected my scanned image. I balanced my levels, added an S-Curve, added more contrast using a 'hard-light' blending mode on a Duplicate Merge layer, and finally applied a Reduce Noise Filter and an Unsharp Mask filter.

On to the Final Touches. I created a new Photoshop document and specified the dimensions I would need for the final printed label. I then placed my retouched image into this document.

And here is how it looks in it's current state!