• NEW BREWERY WORK •

• NEW BREWERY WORK •

I feel very fortunate to be able to work in an industry that I care a great deal about. My graphic design and illustration has been associated with quite a few breweries over the years and Grafters Craft Brewery in Lincolnshire is one of my newer clients. 

They have some great brews and I was very pleased to be able to give them a new breath of life with some fresh branding. So from designing the new logo and then implementing that across all the brand new clips was most satisfying.

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• 2 NEW BEERS •

• 2 NEW BEERS •

Here are just 2 of the new beer clip and label designs from this month's output.

These 2 are poles apart - almost literally. One for traditional cask beer market in the heart of the Uk. The other down under in the fast growing craft beer arena of New Zealand.

The ever inventive Golden Eagle Brewery always seem to catch the flavour of the moment with their delicious new brews. This is not first hand experience unfortunately, but garnered from the many favourable comments on beer drinking social networks such as Untappd.

Next up in the blog I'll be able to reveal the fun project that I've been working on for the last 12 months. All is about to be published and revealed. Watch this space.

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• 2015 starts with a few beers! •

• 2015 starts with a few beers! •

A Happy New Year to you all, bit late I know. The year did kick off with a busy few weeks of work, and again, none of which I can post as yet.

But I also produced quite a few beer clips and labels for one brewery or another, and here are two of the ones that are not embargoed at the moment.

One of my new years' resolutions was to bake more bread, that's already ticked and done and I'm onto my 7th loaf today.

Other, none specific promises to myself, are to finally get my last 2 picture books completely finished and off to some publishers, or agents maybe.

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•LE TOUR COMES TO BARNSLEY •

•LE TOUR COMES TO BARNSLEY •

On the 6th July the mad cap circus that is the Tour de France flashes through the western edge of my home town. I'm a keen mountain biker and have never ventured over to the 'dark side' but this road race will definitely be one worth celebrating.

Excellent website with all the details ...

http://letour.yorkshire.com/

I've been involved in a few marketing and promotional spin-offs for Le Tour and these 2 designs are amongst them.

The top image is a T shirt design that's been entered into a competition and exhibition at the Millenium Galleries, Sheffield.

The bottom one, a pump clip (beer clip) for Wentworth Brewery, who have brewed a special celebration race ale.

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•CREATING MOLTEN LAVA •

•CREATING MOLTEN LAVA •

For this new beer clip for Golden Eagle Brewery I needed some convincing fiery lava.

I remembered a trick I'd used a few years ago, when needing to set some gravestones 'on fire' for  CD cover. The shadows between rocks, cracks in rocks etc if inverted and then filed with yellows and oranges took on a realistic kind of molten lava effect.

So I picked a stock photo of cracked mud - picture 1 - and ran radial blur over it to 'explode' it a little.

Then after inverting the photo - picture 2 - and adding reds and oranges into the cracks with an overlay glow it soon started to take on the feel of glowing coals and cracking lava flows.

In picture 3, I've used some 'noise' in a channel and exploded that with the same radial blur and sprayed extra yellows and oranges over the lava using this noise explosion as the mask. Picture 4 shows smoke that was used judiciously to overlay certain areas and give a smouldering, steaming effect.

Picture 5 shows the various type effects that were blended together and then overlaid onto the lava artwork, some of the yellow cracks from the mud photo can be seen overlaying the text.

In the final 2 pictures you can see how I arrived at the final beer clip design. The addition of a distant volcano, another lava field at the bottom and it's complete. One of the hops used in the brew is called Jade. Jade, and indeed New Zealand, were created by volcanic action hence the monumental name.

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•PHOTO REALISTIC BREWERY POSTERS •

•PHOTO REALISTIC BREWERY POSTERS •

These 2 posters were part of a set illustrated for Wentworth Brewery.

I've stuck the Stout clip on there to show how these 'blank' bar posters can be used in conjunction with new brews which will be released throughout the year.

Hopefully these delightful brews will whet your thirst and tempt you to track one down. And I promise you, if you do, you'll not be disappointed by the wonderful hand crafted full bodied taste.

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•MY BREWERY PORTFOLIO•

•MY BREWERY PORTFOLIO•

As well as my 'standard' portfolio of work for advertising, design and publishing, I also specialise in design and illustration for Breweries.

Just recently I've had a marketing drive to expand my brewery portfolio and I'm pleased to say that it is working.

I now design for around 6 breweries. These are local, national and global - so a really interesting mix.

I'm still looking to add a few more breweries to my list so the drive goes on.

My favourite beer is STOUT. I love the look of it, it's a very 'designy' beer - deep glossy black rich ale with all those complex flavours of roasted barley, chocolate, liquorice and treacle. Wonderful.

I must have produced artwork for over 20 different stouts to date and the number of individual pump clips and labels I've designed numbers over 300 to date!!

Please take a look at
MY BREW PORTFOLIO
and pass on the message. cheers!

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•NEW BREWERY BRANDING•

•NEW BREWERY BRANDING•

Another couple of micro breweries joined the Hot Frog brewing portfolio last month. He's one of them, the exciting sounding Broxbourne Brewery - home of the crafty badger!

I tried out several run of the mill - almost cliched, ideas to get the creative juices rolling. I wasn't getting anywhere meaningful but it's often useful to exorcise the banal from the equation in this way, before you can 'see through' to the more promising ideas.

Then I had this vision of the the Moretti beer label with the old guy blowing the froth off his fresh glass of beer. I coupled this with a cheeky badger and sketched out the character and hey presto, Brox, the crafty badger was born.

Broxbourne and their sister brewery have some very strong ales in their repertoire and here's hoping we'll have a long and fruitful future together. Cheers to that.

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• GOLDEN EAGLE LABELS AND CLIPS

Here are 2 new designs for the wonderful Golden Eagle brewery in New Zealand.
I've recently added a couple more new breweries to the Hot Frog portfolio, but still producing work for my existing ones.
You'll have seen from earlier posts that I recently re-designed the logo for GE and I'm now onto my 4th clip/label set.
Golden Eagle is based in Rolleston South Island, but will soon be re-locating to Christchurch.
If you've sampled their beers then why not leave me a comment.
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• BREWERY POSTER, CLIPS AND LABELS

The graphic design work I do for various breweries is very important to me.

I trained as a graphic designer, specialising in Illustration and after weeks of illustration work I always enjoy coming back to the discipline of design.

Plus I get to sample all the beers!

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•BEER BEER WE WANT MORE BEER!

World Cup Fever has reached Hot Frog too with these three beer labels for local breweries. Don't forget it will bring us good luck to get stocked up on these ales prior to KO on June 12th.
Wish I was on a royalty per bottle!
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