2013 Let's Art

Yama Otoko Winter Ale

Thee Bock

'Bout time I dusted off the old graphics tablet and booted up the old graphics software and made some art to stick on some of these bottles of beer I've got piling up around here. Click those and have a good look, and then come back to hear more. I'll wait.

The Sasquatch I told you about last time turned into Yama Otoko for the local audience here in Japan. It literally means "mountain man" and is analogous to our Sasquatch as near as I can tell. I did the pencil drawing based on the iconic still from the iconic Bigfoot footage by Patterson and Gimlin. I futzed around with it for a while in Photoshop, and eventually landed on this design. I guess it has a bit of Hiroshige woodcut influence tossed in with a graphic style like vintage European booze posters, and a nod to the poster for the movie Akira with the text across the bottom. None of that was premeditated, and I could be just making it up--in fact I totally am. But it seems to fit.

Now as for the bock label, there was this goat...

What part of "Ngueeh" don't you understand?

I used a photo of this old goat we ran across while traipsing around a little island in Okinawa. We came over a hill and around a bend and he was literally just looking at us like that, like, "Take the picture, go ahead, tell all your friends how you went to the end of Okinawa to find me, and how cool I looked, and how you were the only ones to see me standing here looking at you all stoically as if to say,'take the picture, go ahead, tell all your friends…' We did feel pretty special running across this goat, I won't lie. At any rate.

I didn't draw this one, but rather imported the photo into Illustrator and did the line work on top of it. Yeah, I traced it. So what. This design was about 25 times the work of the other one. People like to criticise certain types of image-making and say that a child could do it, meaning that it's easy or lazy. But you rarely actually see a child with the focus necessary to actually do what needs to be done, graphically. Let me change that, you do. You just don't think it's worth all that much, and even less when an adult does it. OK, end of rant. This design was a lot of work.

I won't bore you with the details, but I will say, if you are looking for a cool old-timey engraving effect, you'd be better off getting yourself a metal plate and some engraving tools, rather than do what I did and try to make a bunch of lines and a displacement map in Photoshop. Seriously. Lost some hair getting that to look right. But in hindsight it was great to learn some new stuff, relearn some old stuff, and generally get my art on, as I (sadly) have not done much, lo these many moons.

So these are a couple of labels that I've made recently. I don't know what possessed me to suddenly restoke the old graphical fires, but I think that the birth of my first kiddo might be responsible, in some way. Check me'n her out:

Nisi's got a hold on me

Stay tuned for more in the way of beer.