First and foremost, I tell all my clients I am a painter.  I am great with artwork and designing a piece that caters to their needs.  I do dabble in a bit of graphic design, but I do not do descriptions.   Working with this client before, they knew what I was capable of, and knew I could create the ideal image.  This client loves detailed, big pieces of art.  I was asked to design a beer label that illustrated the creation of an IPA beer, with honey.  My client requested that it have fermenting tanks, honey, hops, and a brewery.  It needed to be done by the beginning of the summer.  This is the finished illustration below.

I was told that this would be on an 18 oz. bottle, so I knew that I had more room to work with than the previous design.  Knowing by this point that my client preferred that the image told a story, when I was doing sketches I kept that in mind.  

The audience, I kept in mind, is most certainly people who love craft beers. 

The title was not made yet, but was thought of by my client as the label was created.

When I started these ideas out, I tried just focusing on hops and honey at first, then played with the fermenting tanks, and the breweries.

I also played around with the idea of a bee representing honey.  I kept coming back to the bee in later ideas.

On this page of thumbnails, I really liked the sliced open hop on the lower right with the honey comb inside of it.  My client also liked it, it was one of the top two favorites as the idea for the label, but it was the simplest idea, and did not show fermenting tanks or a brewery.

Here I played with the idea of a brewery and tanks over run by hives and hop plants.  I played around with the idea that the bees are working inside of a brewery making the IPA themselves.

The top right sketch became the final idea chosen by my client, because it showed the inside of the brewery.  We combined the idea next to it, and decided the hop that the bee carries should be covered in honey.

These were some extra ideas not chosen by my client.  I really liked the bee carrying the hop, but it did not show enough of the story.

After picking out the best ideas, I made a final layout of perspective, of what the tanks and brewery could look like, how tall the worker bees should be in relation to the tanks.

This was the final color composition that I showed to my client before working on the final perspective.  My client wanted the whole thing to be green in hue to emphasize that the IPA is rich in hops.  He approved of this idea, and mentioned that most of the people who make this brew have beards, and wanted the bees to have beards as well. This was what lead to the creation of the title of this IPA.

Once I got my final thumbnail approved, I made a better perspective grid and made accurate placements of the worker bees, while cleaning up the line work. 

This took a while, because I wanted the tanks to be precisely made in one point perspective, and I hand made the grid in Photoshop, by drawing out each line.   My one mistake, I should have done this in two point perspective in a different program to save time, but I did not think it would look the same.

After finding many images of fermenting tanks on google, I determined what should be added to the tanks, like valves, the gauges, and the little door.

I made the final Adobe Photoshop document 20 inches by 20 inches, at 600 DPI.  This ensures that no matter what size my client wants to print it at, it will not be "pixelated".  I began on the character in the foreground first, testing my brushes to get the perfect fuzz on the bees.

I slowly built up the tanks in the background, while building up the fur and other bees in the foreground.  The one issue I was having at the time was deciding how to go about doing the beards on the bees.

At this point, the tanks were pretty much done, but I was still playing around with ideas for the beard.

At this point, my client and I decided that a hexagon tiled floor would be nice.  The middleground was pretty much completed, the hop itself I worked on for a few hours to ensure it looked realistic, and the honey around it looked transparent and gooey.  I also finally decided on a beard design that looked the best on the bees.  The other designs hid the shapes of the bees faces too much.

At this point, my client decided on a title, "bearded bees", so I went into Adobe Photoshop and picked out many fonts, and laid them all out in a single document.  I took away all the ones I did not like, and eventually decided on one particular font.

This font was my favorite, but I had also made another font very quickly as a "honey font" in Adobe Photoshop.  My client loved it, and requested that I put that in instead. My client also requested that I add some hop plants in the background growing up the walls and through the ceiling.

This is the final artwork with the title. I had added a bit more blue in the background and took away some of the darker tones after doing some test prints.

After discussing things with my client, they wanted to keep things simple like the last label, and asked me to just put the artwork on the old label and change some things around.  I felt like it was too simple, and I made a hexagon border that fades out in Adobe Illustrator.  My client liked it, and decided to stick with it.  The IPA is not finished at the moment, and my client decided they would have someone else fill out the description.