Everything Including a Bicycle

Detail from juice label project- unused

A couple of weeks back, I posted some of the labels I did for Mountain Sun Natural Juices.Those pieces actually made it onto the product, but I also did two background labels for proposed product lines that never actually (as far as I know) went into production. This is the piece I did for the proposed "sport drink" line of juices. It was intended to be a natural alternative to Gatorade and would consist of real fruit juices with added electrolytes and vitamins, etc. 

Sport Drink label for Mountain Sun Natural Juices- approx. 17" x  5"- acrylic

They wanted the background illustration to depict all sorts of outdoor athletic activities such as runners, cyclists, etc., in a more urban setting (parks, neighborhoods and such.). The logo and the flavor spot would go dead center as in the other labels, so I curved the path around and placed the other characters and elements so that they would not be obscured by the type (at least I tried- this didn't exactly work with the other labels either). Here's how it turned out, and I did get paid for the piece.

Bottled Up

Detail from the Tropical Juice line label

A few years back I did a series of fruit juice labels for Mountain Sun Natural Juices. I created four different background paintings as well as about twenty different flavor spots that were inserts into the logo.Here are a few of the labels as they were printed. Packaging tastes changes about as fast as the tides, so these labels have long since disappeared, but I thought they turned out beautifully.

They were also nice enough to send along a case of assorted flavors of juice with my labels on them. I still have a bottle of the cherry cider (which was probably one of the tastiest) on my studio bookcase. It's far past it's "best if used by" date, but I can't bring myself to crack the top and dump it just yet. I guess if the cap explodes someday, then the decision will be made for me.

Tropical

If you look at the work I have done over the years, you'll notice how many times I have had the chance to create this type of stylized landscape. I have a lot of fun making these pictures and the stylization seems to lend a bit of a surreal feel to the scenes without removing the sense of reality that the attention to detail gives it. This painting was done for Mountain Sun Natural Juices as a wraparound background label for their tropical juice line. I also did a number of tropical fruit details that were inset into the center of the label.