Over the past year or two I have had the pleasure of working with a craft brewer start up in Evansville, IN called Tin Man Brewing Co. All their branding, interior and merch were designed by two friends and former co-workers of mine, Matt Wagner and Aaron Tanner. When they asked me to help with some can and glass designs I was super excited. The fact that I loved their beer and all the people there are great folks made the job even better. Check out Matt, Aaron and Tin Man!
Damascene
For this can, I was charged with making art that had to be reproduced as in 3 colors only but we wanted a pulp art look to it. I made the pallet very limited for this piece, maybe 6 colors. So much for warm highlights and cool shadows, its a color plus black for shading in the end. Once I had the image painted and scanned in, I then masked out each color (orange, green, black and the can substrate that would show through). Next I created new channels for what would become each of three pantone colors and started pulling values from my CMYK channels until I had a three color image that was reasonably close to the painting. There was of course some loss of subtle hues but that was to be expected. Aaron then drop the art in layout and created 1 bit tiffs of each color channel and sent them off to the printers. Fingers crossed and lots of waiting...
The art for Damascene is being featured on BeerLabelsArt.com right now.
The ADDYs!
As I sat at home, sick on a Friday night, I started getting tagged in various social media. The Evansville Addy Awards were going on and two of the cans that Matt Wagner and I had created took home some awards. Matt handled all the layout work for both. The main image on each can is where we collaborated. On both we would start with a few sketches and a crude vector rendering of the image and then we would pass it back and forth making changes and talking about it. After a half dozen hand offs, we came to these two designs below. Matt has a very graphic look in most of his work and is able to break things down to their essence where as I get consumed in the details and rendering. Working with Matt always pushes me out of my comfort zones but it always works out well and is a lot of fun.
Two collaborative pieces made with Matt Wagner that brought home Addy Gold.
I may as well go ahead and show this Tin Man Overlord can which was the first collaboration with Matt Wagner. It also started with a few sketches and was passed back and forth many times till we reached a final image that we were both happy with.
Thats all for now. Cheers!
