So if you have been reading recently you may have seen my latest brew was a Saison. This Saison has now been bottled and because I will most probably keep a few back to give away I decided to create a label. I think if someone gets given a bottle of home brew with a label on that complements the style of beer it can alter their perceptions of what it’s going to taste like.
I Am Not Artistic By Any Means
Making labels is not something I do often so I can’t say I’m that good at it, but anyway I thought I’d show you how I went about creating this one on the off chance it would help someone out.
I have to admit that I don’t often give my beer away, primarily because I’m greedy and also because my family live quite a distance away. So most of the time my home brew doesn’t get named, I usually just write on the cap a letter or number combination to signify what it is. For this reason this Saison is named S.
A Tutorial Of Creating the Label
So this is what I came up with, now I have to admit there isn’t much to it. I don’t want to have to tell people what the beer tastes like or what flavours are present. That’s for the drinker to decide. The only thing I had in mind was that is was a Farmhouse style beer and I wanted the label to look fairly rustic with a contemporary feel.
I am by no means a grapic design wiz kid so here are the steps I took to create this label. I used Photoshop but I think you can probably do the same thing in the free software GIMP.
1.First of all I created a new document roughly the size of the label you want, as long as it’s bigger than necessary you can scale it down later.
2. I then grabbed a grungy texture from DeviantArt and resized it to my canvas.
3. On top of this I created another layer of a sort of farm scene I found here which wasn’t really intended to be a focal point but was good enough to add a bit of interest to the whole thing.
4. I then set the layer properties to Vivid light and altered the Opacity as follows:
To end up with this
5. Next up was to the dubious name “S”. Using the font Blackoak std and the colour black, I centred this in the foreground like so.
6. This type layer was then duplicated and set the blending modes of both layers set to Soft Light, to achieve the following:
7. The same process was then used to add the ABV%
8. The last thing I decided to do was add a border to the whole thing to frame it nicely, I created a rectangle and cut away the centre. I then added another texture to the border to tie everything in using the following settings.
The final label:
Overall i’m fairly pleased with the label and think it complements the style of beer, like anything though I guess it’s a subjective thing. At least it’s slightly better than giving someone a few bottles with a letter scribbled on the bottle cap in permanent marker.
