wine and wine labels

Wine is good to drink... my latest favorite at the moment is
Menage a Trois.
Very mild and I love the red. Today, being the type of day it is, makes it perfect for wine. To be frank I have not even had a sip, but I do feel like it is a spendid day to sip.

Meanwhile, I forgot to say that I am back from Florida. Another business trip for the company I work for; rather uneventful. I had the afternoon and evening to myself and did not do a thing except browse the internet and watch a movie. (more on the trip and the movie later)

Below is the home page image of Folie a Deux Winery, makers of Menage a Trois red.

The web site was designed by 4C. They do very nice work and tag themselves as an interactive design and development company. Here's the plug from their website:

4C is a multi-disciplinary interactive design firm that specializes in creating brand centric, cross medium integrated sales & marketing campaigns that combine interactive, email, and print platforms.

I've run across another link in the ArtDepartment blog. It is the February 14 post in which Irene Gallo , owner of the ArtDepartment blog, makes a very short tag on the wine label designs of James Jean. Excellent illiustrator.

His work is highlighted in the website Dieline, a site pretty much dedicated to packaging design.

I could pretty much get lost just looking up wine label designs (Wescott Design is pretty good).

His wine labels are below and his blog is addicting. He gives a decent explanation of the the wine label design. From brainstorming to sketch to final label; read the entry to get his take on the process. The type of work he does inspires me to continue with my sketch book. He shows a lot of samples of his work and links to his sketch books as well as the art he sales. Again James Jean painter, illustrator.

His styles goes from very polished, classsical portraits

... and illustration.

to his sketches, whimsical fantasy and figure studies.

Obviously I am more interested in his drawings and sketch books, but he seems to do quite a bit of illustation for magazines like Wired; Rolling Stone and so on.

I drew while I traveled, bought a magazine on Laptops - a sort of PCmag just for laptops users. There were quite a bit of reviews and also some tech talk and gadgetry. Small camera with superior lens first > then a laptop.

I also bought the book Wicked by Gregory Maguire. I'm going to make another attempt at a screenplay. This may involve a young man that gets involved in theater production. Possibly a "coming unto oneself" story.