WIP | Old Fashioned Artwork
Last March 2015, Nieuw Amsterdam contacted me in regards to having an exhibition of my artworks. They saw my Bloody Maria illustrated artwork at Supergraph Exhibition in Melbourne and they really liked it.
Nieuw Amsterdam offered me to showcase my cocktail pieces as the main focus of the show and then use the rest of the space to display any other artworks. I felt very honoured by their proposal and after having a face-to-face meeting with them, I started to work on a new piece featuring an Old Fashioned drink.
The reason why I chose this cocktail is because I wanted to use a different type of liquor. I had already featured vodka and gin on my previous artworks, so it was time for a drink featuring whiskey or bourbon.
Thinking about the Old Fashioned cocktail, the first image that came to my mind was a really comfortable dark space, full of beautiful leather couches and warm lights; a very intimate space with cigars.
Old Fashioned cocktail research
I did some research about the cocktail’s recipe and I decided to work on oranges as the main focus of the piece. I love this fruit and its colours.
All oranges and the glass have been drawn by hand using a 0.38 and 0.50 ballpoint pen. Then scanned, cleaned and coloured in Photoshop.
Doing further research I found an interesting post from The Slate:
The old-fashioned is at once “the manliest cocktail order” and “something your grandmother drank,” and between those poles we discover countless simple delights, evolutionary wonders, and captivating abominations. Because of its core simplicity and its elasticity—because it is primordial booze—ideas about the old-fashioned exist in a realm where gastronomical notions shade into ideological tenets. It is a platform for a bar to make a statement, a surface on which every bartender leaves a thumbprint, and a solution that many a picky drinker dips his litmus paper in. You are a free man. Drink your drink as you please. But know that your interpretation of the recipe says something serious about your philosophy of fun.
Good Old Fashion Lover Boy
There is a song by Queen called “Good Old Fashion Lover Boy”. I used to be a big fan of Queen when I was a little girl, so this gave me the inspiration for my lettering “I learnt my passion in the good Old Fashioned”.
Old Fashioned Lettering Style
Regarding the lettering style, from the beginning I had the idea of using a neon sign combined with a vector pattern of a leather couch in the background. I began to work on the lettering using a monoline. These below are a few sketches:
Adding colour to the line work in Illustrator:
Vectorising the letterforms:
