Craft beer, vegan food, and dogs are some of my favourite things. Yulli’s Brews, it must follow, is one of my favourite places. One distinguishing feature of their brand is that each brew of beer is tied to a character designed and illustrated by the inimitable Charles Taperell.
This year, they hosted a competition to design the character for their latest Art Ale, in collaboration with the Incognito Art Show and Byron Writers Festival. My character, whom I gave the interim name “Alepollo”, was the winning submission!
Concept
Yulli’s Brews’ existing designs are in the form of named characters drawn in a loose, ligne claire style and carry a cheeky, distinctively Australian casualness. I wanted to pay homage to this style, but still inject my own voice into the work.
Further, I had to think of a way to weave in “art” as a theme itself. The end result did this in a few ways. The first is the idea of using classical or religious art themes as a basis. In this case, The Creation of Adam is the basis, which is also a callback to “Polysthetic” as the low-poly (low-fidelity) marble statue goddess. The tone might be a bit more pretentious than what you’d see in Yulli’s Brews can, but I think the cheeky irreverence here is what makes it work.
As for the character, I searched through the list of Greek and Roman gods associated with arts or beer. Apollo, the god of music, poetry, song and dance, is the one that is common to both mythologies that can also form a pun with beer, hence, “Alepollo”.
The second way is through the use of the Golden Spiral to lay out the composition. The rainbow, beer cloud which Alepollo floats on, his body and limb alignment, and the droplets to the right all lay on or are proportioned to the spiral and its construction lines. This is also why some odd proportions appear in the end, e.g. the asymmetrical arc of the rainbow and the long limbs of Alepollo.
The third way is through the literal subject matter, which is how beer is brought in to the artwork. In this case, I draw comparisons between beer and colours in two ways. The first is a rainbow made of all colours of beer (I chose a stout, red ale, amber lager, and pale lager). The second is by having the rainbow serve into a beer tasing paddle shaped like an artist’s palette, again drawing the link between a palette of colours, but also a palette of tastes.
The symbolism of beer is also reinforced in the clouds in the background which are drawn like foamy beer heads over-flowing the glass.
Sketches and Studies
This idea was fermenting in my head before committing it to paper. The first sketch was a small thumbnail showing most of the concepts discussed previously, but with a bearded figure. This was drawn before I settled on Apollo.
In the sketchbook was a more refined sketch that was drawn to the size of the paper. This one was more purposefully constructed to the golden proportions, inked, coloured with markers, and highlighted with a white acrylic pen.
Concurrently, I was sketching out studies of hand details, reference images of Apollo statues, and some of Yulli’s Brews existing characters to flesh out the final direction.
Colouring
Whilst the detailed sketch was physically coloured, I didn’t want to do this with the final A3 artwork. This was instead coloured digitally with Krita to retain some of the flat colour look of Yulli’s Brews. However, I used tools with a bit of texture and layering so that it is not completely flat. This can be seen in the background with some visible brusktrokes, the layering in the beer colour to give the illusion of light passing through, and the pencil-textured blue and pink rim light highlights on Alepollo and the beer foam.
There were some amazing submissions in this contest which you can see over on the Yulli’s Brews Instagram page. Some of my favourites include:
- Andrina Mannon’s girls dancing around an anhropomorphic can drawing in a sketchbook. This one is reminiscent of another artist I follow, Marisa Mu, and her ‘Rhythm in Colour’ series of artworks.
- Simon Deshon’s “Fred” the beer fermentation tank.
- Jaz Lynch’s “Colin the Old Master” the artist koala.
Final Thoughts
All in all, I had a tonne of fun putting this piece together, and I thank Yulli’s Brews and the Incognito Art Show for their selection. As of the writing of this article, the second part of the contest, which is the official naming and story around this character, is ongoing. I cannot wait to see what the writer’s come up with!
My interim backstory for the submission was:
“Alepollo is the beer craftsman of the gods. He serves streams of every brew under the sun in rainbow fountains into pallettes of all colours and flavours. The droplets that spill onto the Earth form the seeds of luck, inspiration, and good fortunes for craft brewers around the world.”