Wine Label Commission

As things were winding down at the end of the year, or so I thought, I was contacted by a local vineyard about doing a wine label drawing for them. This is an organic vineyard with a very limited production of grapes to be sold to other labels. They do however hang on to enough grapes to make a small run of their own label in various types of wine, Pinot Noir, Chardonney and a red I can't think of. For their label they choose a local artist of their choice to do their Artist Series wine label.

I drove out to the vineyard and snapped a lot of ref photos with an idea of putting their dog on the label...fat chance, about 3 previous artists did that same dog. They were at the time training a sheep dog to watch after sheep they would use in the future for mowing the grass between the rows of grapes...remember, organic vineyard. I got the idea of putting their sheep grazing in the vineyard so here is how I came up with my label.

Problem 1... it was December so no wonderful thick grapeleaves in sight. Here you can see my angle I would use with the distant mountains...the only thing in this scene I would use. This is one of the refs of the actual vineyard.

Next thing to do was come up with some cool rows of grapes with leaves. I had snapped some ref photos at another vineyard while doing a show there so I used their grapes.

Here are the vineyards sheep who posed for me while eating lots of grass....any grass!I took these images into Photoshop and put together an image that worked...sent it off to the vineyard for approval and then drew the image on illustration board in light pencil to begin inking. They wanted an oval format and I played with the values in black and white to make the image work better for their sake.

My drawing is lighter here. I tend to draw light but that's ok because in working with various printers I found the printing ink usually darkens any drawing a few values. They use the blackest ink I've ever seen for printing. I let the owners know about this and even asked them to reduce the vlaues a bit to make it look better. I didn't like the values in my original drawing...too light and it looks better notched down a bit.Here is a preview of what the label will look like. They liked it a lot. They will bottle the wine next August and release the wine in Feb 2009. A long wait but it will be fun to see the label.