BrewDog Gold Can Watercolour Painting
Let me tell you the story behind this painting of a gold beer can.
The inspiration, in a way, came from a competition that a multi-national craft beer company ran a coupe of years back. The company is BrewDog, and the competition was to find a 'solid' gold can in one of their multipacks of Punk IPA. If you find one, you win the can worth £15,000. Simple, right? Except the winners ended up rather disappointed, almost as if they had lost... How can that be? Here is what happened...
First of all, I have to say, that BrewDogs beers, in my opinion, are pretty tasty and delicious. My two favorite's are Elvis Juice and Punk IPA. Anyway, the CEO of this company is a man called James Watt. It turns out that James made a big mistake, which ended up costing him (a reported) £500,000 to put right. The valuation of these cans was correct, but they were not solid gold after-all, but actually only gold plated, which apparently left the winners of the competition a little upset. James offered to buy back the cans from the disgruntled winners, which cost him around £500,000 of his own money. He ended up with a cupboard full of 40 returned gold cans.
All in all, this mistake became a bit of a shit show! I was observing this go down over social media and noticed that James was getting a lot of stick. This being said, what I didn't see was anybody highlighting the other mistake - perspective. The winners were gifted their gold cans. They now owned something worth fourteen grand that they didn't have the day before, but for some reason it wasn't enough. To me, this seems like a strange perspective indeed. Now, I must say, I wasn't inspired to create this painting to lick James Watt's bum hole. He is a successful, wealthy CEO, it's likely he's not a saint and he doesn't need my help. I illustrated this because I felt like we have lost our way. I get that people didn't receive exactly what they wanted, but they certainly didn't end up with the worst outcome either. They found themselves somewhere in the middle, and maybe that's ok?
So, I will leave you with my watercolour painting, the process, and also a meditation to test something out of you fancy it? Next time you are in a restaurant or ordering a takeaway, don't order the thing you want the most, don't order what you would want the least either (what you really don't like), order something in the middle and watch what happens. I try and do this regularly, it's surprising, but you will be alright! You will likely discover that it's possible to enjoy things without them needing to be exactly what your heart (or appetite) desires the most.
Here is the process
Can sketch in my sketchbook..
I needed to wait for my next pay day to buy an A2 sketchbook, but I was in the zone and wanted to draw my idea! So I used what I had, which was smaller paper which I taped together.
I had to share this photo of my best studio mate napping in the curtains!
Here is the finished painting!
You can find a video of the process over on my youtube channel, I hope you check that out and that you enjoyed this blog post!
Peace!
