I’ve just finished an illustration for an new craft beer and thought I’d share it with you. I can’t tell you anything about the brand just yet, but hope to share it with you eventually.
The design called for a illustration of a nautical style knot – specifically, a reef (or square) knot with the ends tied off in a wall knot, like this:
I needed to explore the shape of the knot and scale of the the rope to match the composite on the brief, and add depth in the form of hard shadows:
This image then required distressing to give the impression that this was a vintage diagram, with a much looser feel than the digital drawing. This was first put through another digital process that allowed me some carefully controlled manipulation before transferring the drawing to a block of lino:
I did about half a dozen prints of varying quality which were then scanned.
Finally, the scans were converted to vectors and some further manipulations were made to clean up the frayed ends of the rope, resulting in:
I’ll share the full design just as soon as I can!