Earlier this year I was mentioned in a tweet concerning recommending illustrators for a commission with Birmingham Cocktail Weekend. As this tweet was sent at approx 7am and I had stumbled into consciousness around 10am, I was fairly confident I had missed the boat, but sent some samples of my work along to Alex of Birmingham Museums / Living for the Weekend fame anyway. To my surprise I was invited to complete the commission, an illustrated map of the cocktail venues for visitors to use that also highlighted key city landmarks.
With two examples of previous Cocktail Weekend maps to guide me, I began to get to grips with the layout of a city I know pretty well, and juggled between a clear, light design and my hand-rendered pencil style. I was keen to bring out landmarks that were also host to cocktail venues, such as Marmalade inside The REP, Edwardian Tea Rooms inside BMAG, Selfridges inside the Bullring and more, rather than these simply be decorative additions. I also wanted to emphasise the numbers building upon previous years where these hung back a bit more, bringing them into the fore with location pins featuring the weekend's headline sponsor brand colour of Connoisseur purple.
Naturally after plotting the cocktail venue co-ordinates in detail, I baddest myself a wristband and took a trip to sample some of the weekend's offerings myself, 9 of them in one night to be exact. It was heaps of fun, alongside my buddy Heidi of CAGED Arts fame, visiting some different bars for the first time and getting a specially designed cocktail in each especially for the weekend. Below was the little golden-based number from The Bull's Head, our penultimate stop before reaching the dizzy heights of Rofuto. Fair play BCW, this was my kind of drink and draw.
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