WIP | Negroni Cocktail
Ciao Negroni! is a new illustrated artwork featuring this classic Italian cocktail.
The inspiration behind this piece is a blog post from BonAppetit.com called “How to Drink like an Italian”. On this post, Bon Appetit restaurant and drinks editor Andrew Knowlton states: “Italians drink differently than we do. They sip, stir, linger over low-octane cocktails“.
Personally I love Italy and as Jessica Webster says “How can you not love a culture that so lustily celebrates the finer things in life? Opera, art, fashion and food.”
Nieuw Amsterdam offers a variation on this cocktail called Chilli-Choc Negroni. I love chillies so I decided to go ahead with this version of the Italian drink.
Negroni Design Process
I wanted to use the colours of the Italian flag without being too obvious. Chillies gave me the red colour palette I needed, so I began to illustrate them as my starting point. The other ingredient from Nieuw Amsterdam’s cocktail recipe is Vietnamese mint, which became the second main element in my artwork. These ingredients have been drawn by hand and coloured on the computer.
Negroni Lettering Design
Following the Italian theme, I wanted to introduce an Italian word that could be easily understood in English, so I chose salute. This lettering has been designed using my own Copperplate calligraphy as a reference.
On the other hand, Negroni is a lettering design based on my own Fraktur calligraphy.
The artwork is an elegant interpretation of the Chilli-Choc Negroni cocktail combining red, green and white colours and features chillies, mint, a cocktail glass and sections of the lettering Salute! as decorative elements to build its final shape.
