Brewery Illustrations

This was one of those jobs that came to me a few years ago and never went anywhere. It was sort of a dream project to me at first. I was approached to be the illustrator and creative director for an upstart local brewery.

I never get to work for anybody local. I love beer, and desperately wanted a new local hangout. The owner wanted me to create a unified brand and “look” for the brewery. The packaging. Signage. Bottles and cans. Menus. Everything.

I was so into it, that I worked for free for about four years. I’d supply art as the company needed it. The hours of research and design I put in were long, but I found it all to be very interesting. They were getting investors and planting seeds in the beer community. I was earning my bread & butter with other work. This was my “for fun” side-project. I had a good feeling that things would eventually take off and we would all profit down the road from our hard work.

STEAMPUNK was the angle I came up with for the brand. My thoughts were, “what if a traveling inventor became a brewer and had Frankenstien’s equipment ?“ The whole brand was supposed to be a retro-future. Something akin to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

Lots of “supposed to be”........

Eventually the whole thing fell apart. First, the brewery moved from being “local” to being an hour away. Then there was the lack of payment. I could deal with that as long as I was allowed creative freedom and had fun. But the owner decided that none of my ideas were as good as his. I ended up revising a lot. It became more and more job and not even close to fun or creative. So long story short... I was treated poorly and shown little respect. While trying to explain my point of view to the client, they insulted me and my work. So I eventually left the project.

Here are the last two pieces I did........

The brewery is still trying to get started. They are still using a bunch of my art without compensation. Now they are generating new images without me, and without any sense of a unified branding look or feel.

So the lesson here.....

Don’t get too excited and don’t work for free.

You’ll get taken advantage of every time.

I am proud of the work, though. Since most of it will not be seen or paid for, I may as well show a bit of it here and use it in my portfolio......