Advertising Illustration - Takes on Crown Royal

Advertising illustration always provides a challenge of one kind or another. A while back, I was contacted by Grey Advertising, in Canada. They were working for the big distilling and beverage group, Diageo. Grey was putting together a Father’s Day campaign featuring Diageo’s Crown Royal brand. Although the initial concept was for black-and-white ads for the newspapers, I was asked to quote for black-and-white and full-color versions of the artwork. Knowing it was going to be a ton of work, I priced the project accordingly. We got started… Here is the starting point, a layout I was provided with:Grey wanted separate elements so they could play around with the arrangement. I was to create images of a glass, the Crown Royal bottle, and a tabletop surface. We experimented with variations in the sketch phase…Here was the finished glass element. Drawing that ice was tricky, but in the end, it worked out pretty well:Finally, we arrived at the end-product. Here, the finished art in b&w, and in color:This illustration was very challenging in that it involved lots of reflection and transparency in conveying the qualities of glass and ice, not to mention capturing the details of the label. The Crown Royal Bottle is very complex, as you can appreciate!