“Sour Diesel” Califari print

I was recently contacted by Califari to design a poster & packaging for one of their new strains, specifically “Sour Diesel“. This was a part of a poster project featuring a number of artists (Justin Hampton, Ron English, etc..) which debuted at the Emerald Cup in Dec. and Califari will be hosting a gallery event in the Bay Area at some point soon.

The art direction was pretty lax (my favorite kind) other than the fact they were looking for something that was reminiscent of old fruit box labeling which tend to be very bright & classic looking. I wanted to have a more caricature look to it and immediately thought of an old-timey lemon-head type fella riding a tractor. After a couple different iterations of mixing in the right amount of smelly, machinery & lemons we settled on the final design.

This is my first foray into doing work for the world of Cannabis. Since its legalization here in California there has been an influx of new companies looking to capitalize on it, looking for design & packaging art. Unfortunately as comes with the territory, many of them just seemed unprofessional, rather “burnout-ish”… and didn’t give the impression they would last long or frankly that you would get paid. Califari had a good message, seemed like good folk and were interested pushing some cool artistic projects. I look forward to seeing what they do in the future…