In 2019, I was living in Perth, Australia. Not in the city itself, actually, but in a little suburb just on the outskirts of the city. I was going to college there, at Curtin, and I was not having the best time. I was severely homesick and also the weather was playing tricks on my mind.
Near where I lived, there were a lot of fields. Australia has a lot of land, and they're pretty good with conserving their biodiversity. There were always a lot of birds around, from the galah cockatoo, to bin chickens (white ibis), but my favourite were the crows.
Crows and magpies are part of the corvid family, and the favourites of one of my best friends, Sam. These birds are super intelligent, and while magpies could be vicious during the swooping season, crows were pretty chill. I used to buy a carton of eggs from the grocery store for a couple of dollars and go to the fields. I would roll the eggs towards the crows and they would play with it for a while and eat it. Before you get too horrified, crows and chickens are different species of birds, so it's just like humans eating beef even though we're both mammals. The eggs in the supermarket aren't fertilised either, so, there you go.
Anyway, this was around the time where I first dabbled with the idea of doing graphic design. I was studying Mass Communication at this time. Even though it was pretty fun in hindsight, in the moment I just knew this wasn't where I needed to be.
Steps of the process, from sketch to final. Rookie mistake I made here was doing all this in Photoshop, so it was a raster image. Ay-ay-ay.
I wanted to make an alcohol bottle label. Why? Not sure. Maybe it's because Australia is a huge wine producer. This one isn't even a wine label, but hey, it's a personal project so I don't think I need a big reason of why I want things a certain way. I just knew I wanted to do something in black and white, because that's the colour these birds were, and I thought it would look really striking.
I always start with the sketch. I think it helps a lot with the composition. It also helps with setting the vibe of the illustration. I wanted to go fairly realistic in the proportions, since it's for alcohol and a cartoonish look would feel like it was geared towards kids. We don't want that.
I used Adobe Dimension to render the label onto a bottle. I found that the bottle options on Dimension weren't exactly what I imagined, so I went on Sketchfab and found this one, along with a drinking glass to complete it.
I had a lot of fun with this design, and I think it holds a special place in my heart (or my laptop) because it might be what got me started on my graphic design career. It can only get better from here.
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