Finished Beer Can Commission-Painting Walkthrough (Patreon)

Here's the final painting that they'll use on the beer can in October. Again, I filmed the entire process so this post will be in video form as soon as I can edit it.

The Brewery asked if I wanted to do this piece in July for a beer that comes out in October. I thought since it was October I would have more time to work on it. The last week of July they told me they wanted something the first week of august so I started scrambling. 

The Idea

I had a general idea of what I wanted to do from the very beginning. The idea was like a weird formless creepy creature in a mostly dark night sky with some hints of yellow from fire off in the distance.

I looked at some pieces like this one by Hieronymus Bosch for ideas for the landscape and color. (there's more on the other side of this long picture)

Iterating in Photoshop

I played around in photoshop with the design.

I used a template the brewery gave me of where the labels will be on the can. This is the starting point for the composition. 

I crudely cut out and copy and pasted parts of the reference paintings and did some very rudimentary blocking in with colors that I sampled from the Bosch pieces. 

I came up with a color scheme that I might want to use, but ultimately didn't.

I took some pictures of myself posing, and then used that as kind of a structure to build the central figure on top of.

Then I used some texture from other paintings I've done and applied them to the figure. 

At this point I realized I could probably just take it to the canvas. 

Rubber Meets the Road

I used a projector to trace the labels from the template onto my panel. Just kind of blocking that space off so I didn't paint too many important details that would be covered up.

I toned the panel with burnt umber, blocked in the figure, did a decalcomania over the figure and started painting an underpainting. First with burnt umber and carbon black, and then adding some opaque grays.

The Cat, the burning building and the moon, were all ideas I had from the beginning as well.

The burning building was the most directly influenced by the Bosch references.

I pretty much lost the pose from the original photoshop session. But I heavily relied on my hand for reference.

Once I had the structure and value I took a picture of the painting and put it back in photoshop and started playing around with color. 

I just didn't want to be experimenting on the painting too much.

I more or less abandoned the color scheme from the first photoshop session, sampled from Bosch's paintings. I went for this deeper blue with splashes of warm colors, which was more of how I pictured it from the beginning. I thought that the color scheme I was thinking of was from this Bosch painting, but when I looked at it and sampled the colors, he used way different colors than I was picturing in my mind. Funny how memory works.

At this point I started layering in the colors. 

I started adding more details. I didn't like the way the yellow glow looked around the figure, so I started adding white to it. I was resisting the glow. I didn't want it to glow so much. But it needed the glow to separate from the background which is basically the same color and value. The glow looked good though too. so I gave up the struggle and justlet that baby glow.

Home Stretch

I continued by painting the details (the flowers) and layering the color and highlights.

Then I scanned it in very high resolution (1200ppi I believe,) color corrected in photoshop, lined it up with the template, and sent it over to the Brewery!

It'll be used on a beer called "Nite Terrors" in October from Angel City Brewery. 

There's also a corresponding show at the gallery which I'm curating. I'll share more about that when it happens and you'll be the first to see the finished can when it comes out!

To give you an idea of how it will look here's a version with the template.