HERNÖ
The bottle of Hernö, Old Tom Gin, has an elegant and playful illustration as its cover, which peaked my interest. In a great collaboration with the filmmaker and photographer, August Sandberg, we produced this artwork.
Credits:
3D & Retouch by Simon Søgaard Vallinder
Studio Photography by August Sandberg
The Process
It all began with a walk through Systembolaget, where we noticed the bottle, standing out from all the others. From there, we spun ideas and experimented with composition and lighting.
Ultimately, we hung the bottle in a thread from a stand. Poured some haze into the room and set up the lighting as you see in the image. One light was underneath the bottle, one from the side with a lot of diffusion, and a strong flash for the background to go through a plant for the dynamic structure in the light.
In the other image you see the setup in my 3D software. Here I placed the lights, camera and objects as we had them in the studio. I configured everything to be as similar to the real world setup as necessary. The Abstract representation of the bottle, which is a deformed simple shape called a torus, was lit just as if it would've been next to the bottle in the studio. To make the reflections in the shape act as if we had it in the studio, I took the background from the photographed image, and applied it to a backplate in the scene.
The abstract representation of the bottle, was simplicity combined with careful construction. I analysed the bottle, and it is primarily glass with a white label, in which there is a red and yellow detail to the illustration. I took these colors and applied them with gradients to the shape.
For those of you who are interested in understanding a bit more about the process, here we go. The odd shape of it I controlled by using a noise that made it thicker or smaller in different areas of it. Without talking in specific terms, I used the shape of spheres to apply the different colors to the different regions of the torus. The largest portion of the shape was in glass which I controlled with a linear gradient, which basically made everything from the left side to the center shift from glass to white color.
