A short tale of turning a blank slate into something beautiful. Of creativity and hard-workmanship. Or of just liking beer a lot. A bit different than my usual posts, but you might agree it’s a nice break in style.
I’ve been a fan of New Belgium for a couple years. One day, I randomly decided to start collecting their 6 pack labels–don’t really know why. For a while, I just taped them to my fridge, which was kinda cool, but over the Christmas break, I decided I wanted to do something a little craftier.
Pretty good selection, right? But what to do with them?
Somehow, the idea of cutting them into beer glass shapes popped into my head. I Googled “beer glasses” a couple times, and found this picture via an Image search (I think from here?):
Seemed like a good sample of standard beer glasses, no?
Through some quick Photoshop trickery, I turned it into these:
Outlined the 4 glasses, removed the background and the one I didn’t want.
Turned the colors way down using the fancy “Curves” tool–props to my buddy Bill Campbell for showing me how to do this!
And then split them up onto their own images.
After they were isolated and darkened, I printed them out on sheets of paper.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of pictures of this next part, but it was kinda difficult. Basically, I decided on a pattern I was going to use, traced it on the labels, and cut them out. Ended up with 4 of these:
Moth-Ger, Trip-Bey, and Belgo.
I was originally going to make the glasses the width of the labels, but they ended up being a little wider than that, which made me get a little tricky with the edges.
Doing all 4 of them took a lot longer than I thought, and I ended up with a big pile of scraps.
You can see some of the cutouts on top, and all the scraps beneath.
Here is the final result of all the cutting!
Next, I needed to mount it on something, so I went and grabbed some cardboard-type stuff from Michaels, and a simple poster frame (cost about $30).
I decided to give it a simple background of the glasses sitting on a table, so I cut them out real quick.
Accompanied by our cat Camelot!
A little bit of Elmer’s Glue later, tada!
A nice, simple design! Took a couple hours, was a nice way to use some beer labels, and is a nice little piece for the kitchen.
Closeup of the smaller pieces.
Little different angle.
Hope this inspires you to get a little creative on your own, whether personally or professionally. Or maybe just to drink some beer!
Very cool idea Lee. I need to start collecting myself.
Thanks Ian! Even if you don’t know what you’re going to do with it just yet, you might be happy you started collecting :).