Sweetwater Brewery 21st Anniversary!!!!!

This weekend is Atlanta’s Sweetwater Brewing‘s 21st Anniversary and they pulled out all the stops throwing a big concert at their brewery to celebrate featuring bands Dirty Heads, Twiddle & People’s Blues of Richmond. They contacted me to come up w/ a design for posters & shirts that would match the chill vibe of the brewery and the bands playing.

“Don’t Float the Mainstream” is Sweetwater’s slogan and references the way they approach making beer as well as the lifestyle they celebrate. The brewery is a very lively place with tie-dyes hanging about, music playing, and a lot of pictures of fish. A lot. Their love for fishing is evident on their packaging as well, so I knew that that this was something that needed to work its way into the design. I wanted a concept that would be very colorful and pretty trippy so I decided on a kind of Hop spirit, especially one with killer mossy sideburns. The concept had a couple different variations and in the end we decided to build the character out more and work the show info as well as some more imagery into colorful smoke-like filagree along the sides.

The print is a 6-color screenprint (18′ x 24′) with a print run of 250, sold initially at the brewery this weekend. They were printed using a great metallic Gold that is pretty eye-catching.

I will be releasing an Artist Edition run of 30 (signed/numbered), on Monday, February 19th…. including a small run of 10 printed on a “lava” foil paper.