Sickdesigner

Bon jour mes amis! Welcome to what seems to be another sick tutorial. Oh, no, it only seems to be. This one’s more like a case study … but with tips. Ok, so it kind of is a tutorial. Anyways, today I’ll be showing you how to make a wine bottle. Needless to say, sickdesigner.com does not endorse the consumption of alcohol. Ever.

Unless you’re at a fancy dinner party with your best friends from the gentlemen’s club smoking 15 year old scotch damped cigars and being served Porto by an Oxford graduate turned butler.
Wow! How many people did I offend with that sentence? Let’s see now…oh, so both of you! Very well then, let’s carry on with this gig.

01

I used a background I had lying around as a backdrop. If you like it and think that you’d want to know how I made it leave a comment and I’ll consider it.

02

Those of you familiar with the 3D modeling world realize that I’m talking about Lathe Modeling.

This is one of those techniques that rubbed off on me from doing 3D work. Those of you familiar with the 3D modeling world realize that I’m talking about Lathe Modeling. It’s really a simple concept: if the object you’re trying to create is symmetric, just do one half then duplicate and flip horizontally. This is one time when being lazy and doing half the work really pays off.

03

Glass is a funny material. It doesn’t really have a color of it’s own [of course, except for tinted glass] but it does refract light within itself a lot. Luckily, my wine bottle is not empty so the glass will take a desaturated red tint; although the background is highly saturated, because of said light refraction and the nature of wine as a material, the bottle appears desaturated. I used a Radial gradient from gray-ish red to dark red for the body of the bottle.

04

Light also likes to bend around a bottle so I added a medium lit desaturated red Inner Shadow to the body.

05

However flat and perfect the glass of the bottle may be, the liquid inside it will undoubtedly create ripples. This is probably the one time I found a Satin effect purposeful. Be careful not to over do it. Subtle, as always, is key.

06

The bottle was looking rather light and not blending nicely with the background so I cheated a bit. I duplicated the bottle, changed it to an opacity of about 20% and made it a flat black.

07

Time to move on to the neck of the bottle. I drew it in a general shape because it really doesn’t matter that much as it will be covered up by the plastic wrapper. I needed this in order to make the wrapper proportional and correct.

08

And here we are with the wrapper. I used the same technique with the Satin effect except I made it darker than the bottle [obviously plastic is less reflexive as glass].

09

Time to add some light bling to the bottle with two white rounded rectangles.

10

Which I then faded out with a layer mask and changed their opacity to 10%.

11

Ah, but the bling is not yet over. For the purpose of a sparkly design I let loose my inner fizziness and drew a few pink dots with sizes varying from 1px-3px. I think it really adds a nice feel to the design, without being too corny or out of place. And no, you can’t argue with me on that one.

12

I just realized I left the white neck of the bottle visible and that white stood out like a Java programmer at a design conference. Changed it to desaturated medium red.

13

You don’t need to be overly obvious in your choices in order to get your point through.

Also I felt it would be appropriate to make a difference between the liquid and the bottle, around the neck. Nothing spectacular, it’s a highlight much like the rounded rectangles on the bottle and another rectangle behind it. This is one to remember: you don’t need to be overly obvious in your choices in order to get your point through.

14

As always I forget about shadows right until the very end when I keep asking myself “what the heck’s missing?”. A simple blurred ellipse will do the trick, as it has many times in the past.

And, of course, some lovely, simple and elegant type to put it all into perspective.

Not a lot of things to take home from this tutorial, I know, but sometimes it’s not the volume of information that matters, but how important it is. Until I again dump a huge payload of insanity on them unsuspecting interwebs, I bit thee fare well, mes amis!
Seriously speaking I really do not encourage drinking alcohol or smoking. They’re bad habits that destroy your body and considerably decrease your performance, both intellectually and physically.

by Radu Chelariu