In Digital Art we briefly explored the Art Nouveau genre, and our next digital art challenge was to make a beverage label in the Art Nouveau style. I really enjoy this genre, with its soft colors and articulate drawing combined with subtle shading. Art Nouveau is mostly “flat” with realism coming from detailed subtle pen lines – something I am horrible at – I tend to lean towards the impressionist side of things. Big swaths of color with no boundaries. I like to color outside the lines…
Fortunately, with a little trickery in Photoshop one can turn just about any photo into pseudo line-art, so monkeys like me only need to worry about coloring. Typically one uses the selection tool, selects an area, then fills. Mostly I like to go freehand with lots of layers, switching back and forth between brush and eraser, or masking back and forth.
For my subject beverage, I chose mead. Honey wine. The oldest known beverage of its type. And, since we got our Flowhive, I’ve been researching how to make mead in small batches. A quart of honey will produce a gallon of mead….so once we get our hive rolling, I’m expecting we’ll get enough honey to make a few small batches of mead…just because we can.
I grabbed a bottle (two, actually – one for my art assignment and one for Whit). I wanted to see how my design ideas would complement a real bottle, so I decided not to go with an empty. The title “Harvest Moon” popped in to my head, probably because of this weekend’s “super-moon” and all the noise about it in the news.
One characteristic of Art Nouveau is classically beautiful women in typically alluring or sensual poses. This intent was not “just because” but often because much of this period work was commissioned for advertising. Sex sells. Fortunately, I know a classic beauty or two…I asked the timeless Denicia Conley if I could troll her Instagram feed for a suitable photo (first making sure she’d be okay with contributing to my art assignments). She had modeled for some local designers, so I was pretty sure I could find something suitable.
I thank Hidden Legend Winery for the use of their Pure Honey Mead (it’s a five-star rated mead, BTW) and my pal Denicia Conley for allowing me to get artistic with one of her photos. As always, feedback welcomed.