Semeli Wine Watercolors

Here is one recent job, watercolor illustrations for the Semeli Wine magazine and newspaper ad.

The illustrations show the ingredients used in producing this special wine. The art concept was to create the image with all these fruits and flowers growing from a single branch. The choice to do the illustration in watercolor was made, and I was called by the advertising agency (Bold, Ogilvy & Mather) to do it, they knew that I have many watercolor illustrations in my portfolio. I thought it was going to be easy and sweet job for me. Well, it was not.

watercolor lettering wine grapes rose lemon strawberry cherry Flowers

The project had gone through many changes and corrections, so many that I really lost track. So I took the images from my sent mail, and put them all in these 3 sets of images, just to show the amount of work and patience from the art director and me that got us to the result that satisfied the client.

At some point I counted around 30 watercolors…

...and the demands for corrections kept on coming.

The image down is one of the early ones. I thought it was fine, but the client was not satisfied. They wanted more contrasts on the grapes.

Later on, I got stuck on the roses, unable to understand what was the result the client wanted. Fortunately, after talking to the art director, I came up with this solution – I made 4 lighter watercolor versions, and combined them digitally into all these versions so the client could choose.

Finally, this is the result!

I made several versions of letters for the title, these are the ones that were sent to the client to choose.

The second illustration started with a careful detailed sketch…

The main obstacle through all this project was that the client wanted a fresh watercolor with all the exact details. But, once one starts working in watercolor with precision and details, there are no free brushstrokes, and the freshness is gone! So I tried working in in large scale. This strawberry only is the size A4!