First impressions matter, and with wine there’s no exception. We take a great deal of time and care to ensure that we bring the best wines to life and pride ourselves on having exceptionally great looking labels too.
As a business, we work with lots of artists around the world to create unique and beautiful bottle labels for us however, a lot of the artwork is actually designed and put together here at Virgin Wines HQ.
So how do we go about creating a label? We get asked that question a lot, so I’m going to run you through how we created the wine label for one of my favourite pieces, the Bella Perla Pinot Grigio.
Inspiration
Alex Davies, a wine buyer for Virgin Wines once asked me into our wine room raving about a lovely Italian Pinot Grigio that he’s discovered. It was pretty damn good and he wanted something a little different for the label, and so with that in mind he set me a brief.
He told me the name of the wine; Bella Perla and showed me a few images that he wanted me to use as inspiration. One of these images in particular stood out to me, The Birth of Venus by Botticelli and Alex asked if we could feature this on the bottle somewhere. For a long time I’ve wanted to try a fully painted label, so I suggested taking the essence of this image and adding our Virgin flare to it. With that we both agreed and I got to work.
Concepts
The next stage is always to do a rough layout to get the idea across. With a piece like this being painted, we didn’t want to put a lot of work in for it to miss the mark and to be something that Alex wasn’t expecting. However, I quickly worked out how I want the label laid out and got the approval.
Painting
Now for the fun part! With everyone happy for me to go ahead I started working on the Venus and what she was going to look like. For this I didn’t use any traditional media, just my iMac, Photoshop and a pen tablet that I use to do all my paintings nowadays.
Here are the stages I used to bring the Venus alive:
Sketch
I created a simple pencil sketch outline to work out the figure and various elements. Taking cues from the original painting along with inspiration from 50’s pin ups to give it the Virgin feel.
Flats
Once I’m happy with that I then moved on to adding flat colours underneath my sketch layer whilst checking that Alex is happy with the direction I’m going in. Here I used contrasting colours, skin tones and pastel blues which helped me ‘pop’ the main subject out a little so she didn’t get lost in the shell.
Establishing Lights
I then popped two circles to show where my light sources were coming from, the larger of the two being my main source. This allowed me to add some simple shadows to the piece and give it some depth.
Rendering
Once everything is set up we got the go ahead and just start painting! I changed her hair to give her a pin up feel and added a little more red to match the Virgin colours. The whole piece took me about a day to complete.
Typography
Now we had our Venus, we had to feature all the information about the wine on the front label. Following on from the painting, I take a script font and trace over it with some brush strokes to give it that dry brushed look. I also added the grape variety, the country of origin and vintage. As a whole I kept the pin up travel poster style going whilst adding in some stripes and paper textures too.
And we’re done!
We have our finished label. It got checked off and once everyone was happy, it got sent off to our bottlers to be printed and stamped on those lovely bottles of Pinot. I had so much fun creating this label and I hope you enjoy it being part of your collection. I couldn’t wait for the finished bottles to come in and I’m a big fan of the wine itself so I hope we’ve done it justice. Why not try some for yourself by visiting virginwines.co.uk.
Thanks for taking the time to see how one of these came together, don’t forget if you want to know more about how we create our labels or anything else about the process we’re happy to answer across any of our social channels.
