Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Red and White Wine

It's been a week!
These are the two winelabels I wrote about in my last blog. I have family in Portugal. My mothers sister was married to a Portuguese man, he passed away last year. The family owns an old vineyard, with red and white grapes. Now that my oncle passed away, my cousin tries to keep the wine harvest going. She lives in the Netherlands but flies over to Portugal as much as she can. There are so much things to do overthere. The old house needs fixing for example and there's the grapes that need to be picked every year. Before, my oncle used do all the things in and around the land, but now he's gone, my cousin tries to organize things. It's a lot of work! Especially since my aunt (her mother) recently had heartsurgery. Luckily, they got a lot of lovely people over there to take care of things around the house and to look after the land.

This year the grapes were picked by a lot of local people. I offered to design a wine label for the red and white wine from 2012. This seemed to me like a very fun thing to do! The idea of winebottles with a label made by me, gives me a good feeling! My work for people to see, and to hopefully, enjoy for a moment when they look at it.

My oncle who passed away last year was named "Fausto" and my cousin came up with the idea to name the wine "Fausto Tinto" (the red wine) and "Fausto Branco"(the white wine). "Moita de Alvorninha" is the name of the mountain the vineyard is on.

These are the results of the lables I came up with. A lot of trying out....It's a little collage, drawing, painting and writing in indian ink, watercolour and coloured ink. And drawing pen.

The white wine label (Fausto Branco), I'm not completely happy with yet. Work in progress! ;-).

I still, and I say this almost in every blog I write, have to buy myself either a good scanner or a better camera. This is the sharpest I can get the pictures, even with some adjustments in Iphoto and Photoshop. I haven't got the best camera. Still haven't decided if I should spend my money on a camera or on a scanner....Suggestions?

An addition, writing this sunday the 7th: second picture made with a good Nikon camera! Such a difference!



6 comments:

  1. Hello, came here from CC's FB page :)

    I like the labels, they speak about handmade to me and it's really what this vine production is all about.

    Which camera do you have? You have to shoot in the largest mode (pixels wise) and without any compression to get the best results. Or have you tried and it just doesn't work very well?

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    1. Hi Nini! Thank you for taking a look at my creations and reading my blog!
      My camera is a rather simple Samsung. The book that came with it isn't very helpfull. Not easy to find the functions. But I tried to make an adjustment, maybe this will help. Thank you!
      I tried to give the label the 'handmade look', as you said, thought it would match the wine!
      Nice getting to know you through CC!

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  2. Hi Esther! I am also stopping by from creative courage. :) I scan all of my watercolors, and I'm very pleased with the results. Using a camera can be difficult (or at least it has been for me) because it can result in unwanted color tints, such as too much gray or yellow, depending on the light (or lack thereof!). I also paint on arches hot pressed paper, which has a nice smooth finish. I prefer the look of the smooth paper personally, but it also makes my paintings much easier to scan because there is no resulting pattern from the paper in the digital image. I hope that is helpful and best of luck to you!! :)

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    1. Thank you for stopping by Robin! Good to hear your experience about scanning versus using a camera. I'm reading a book about watercolouring and that also describes the hot pressed paper. Sounds like something I would like to try out, and I think want to buy a scanner one of these days.

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  3. Hello Esther, what a nice wine labels! Beautiful colours! It's such a pity my father can't see them any more!Thank you, Angelica

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