Tonic Labels
What I drew on sick time
November 28, 2018
I was down with the flu — really bad flu — for three weeks. Gee bad flu, and survived. After week one I felt the whole sick thing was a waste of time. I managed to grab a sketchbook. I’ve been very into fermenting foods, ginger ale and root beer included. I made a sample using ginger bug and a good supply of herbs from the Mustard Seed Workshop in Nottingham, NH. I was very inspired by the process.
The jury is still out on the success of the root beer flavor. Did not taste as rich and flavorful as I wanted — so the next batch I doubled the herbs. The recipe probably needs more sugar to get the likeness of commercial brands. The ginger however, had a nice after taste kick. I added turmeric cause I heard it helps with inflammation, good for my hiking obsession.
It took a long, long time to recover from the flu. It took a long time before I could get the energy up to sit hours on end at the computer. To feel the joy of executing digital art from the pencil sketch. I checked my former beer label designs to get the same style going.
I limited the color palette on both labels. I used the charcoal brush to outline the characters and type. The type I imported to Photoshop and used the warp tool to adjust the text. Then cut and pasted the modified text back into illustrator.
After the art was outlined with the charcoal brush I used the blob brush on a bottom layer to color in the art. First generalizing, then detailing. The labels took about a day to 2 days each (not counting the time to draw the original). The first one took longer. Of course.
The text was set in illustrator and manipulated in Photoshop with the warp tool. Text was cut from illustrator, then pasted into an open PS doc. After the text was warped to my liking, I dragged the layer back into illustrator and traced the rasterized text with the trace tool. The text was colored and outlined using the charcoal brush tool.
The final label diverted slightly from the original. Over all this was a successful process. The art is available for sale in the shop.
