And it's that time again, to thank my brother for all his hard work and warped ideas. I am truly fortunate to have a friend like him.
So without any more beating around the proverbial bush I would like to share with you the labels and stories we came up with this year.
Scarborough Bruff (aka The Blooze)
The funny thing about this Bruff thing is that the label was basically done as something else, a joke really, a poster of myself, because of this guitar I bought. The guitar is a Bohemian electric guitar made partially out of a can. It's a real functioning guitar with knobs and pickups and strings (oh my). When I came across one in my favourite music store I thought to myself that it would be fun to own one so I ordered it.
The guitar company offers a few different designs on the can itself. They have a hot sauce version, a surf wax one, I think a couple of others. The one I liked and ordered was the moonshine design.
I thought it would be cool to have a couple of pictures of myself with the thing so I put on a white shirt, tied a ribbon around my neck as a tie, and put on a dark jacket, oh and my hat and a cheap pair of dark glasses I bought at a dollar store.
I was only intending to have the photographs taken 'waist up' and so I didn't put on any pants.
My son Elliot did the honours (if you want to call it that) of following me around the apartment and taking photographs.
Once I had the pictures downloaded I brought them into Photoshop and started to work on a poster idea. The apartment building next door was having some construction done and this portable outhouse was set up outside. I took a couple pictures of that too and added it to the mix.
And so Scarborough Bruff Live at the Porta-Pot was created.
When it came time to start working on wine labels and stories it became a natural choice, and it looks like this.
Vat 64
Ralph came up with an idea inspired by the Lord of the Rings and the ent character of Treebeard. Now we didn't want to use the name of that character (I guess we could have, just wanted something different) and in trying to think of a new name we threw in the name Bob, basically as a placeholder, but it stuck.
And naturally Ralph wanted squirrels in the story as well.
I went over to Ralph's place and did the photography. He put the longest bar he had on his chainsaw, the 64, managed to find a chain for it, and that's what we shot. I thought originally that the 64 meant something like 64 inches but Ralph corrected me on that, and that would have been one hell of a bar on it anyway.
In order to try to match somewhat the pose on the Bruff label Ralph one armed the saw, not an easy thing to do because the bloody thing is so heavy. Then it all got thrown in to the Photoshop blender and, voila!
For the handout to go with the gifted wines we came up with a couple of simple (and stupid) stories and made them part of a brochure. I wanted the pictures in the brochure to look a bit different than the labels so played around with them a bit.
Here's what the front of the brochure looked like.
And the Vat 64 story looked like this.
Hope you enjoyed the labels and stories.
