Today’s works of art are by an illustrator apparently living in the Bay Area, Erik Olsen. I say apparently, because a number of the links from his blogs are dead ends, and the faux beer poster’s I’m highlighting here were abandoned in 2006 after only three posts on that blog, Faux Posters. He created three posters as an homage to the great beer posters on the early 20th century. There he described the idea for the project:
It’s a tribute to some of the great poster designs in the early twentieth century. (Specifically those early French beer posters) Our first series is focused on the theme “beer”, each series of 12 prints will be focused on a new topic with limited prints runs. We have many sizes of prints available, everything for the beginner collector to the serious collector. Stay tuned as we add new Images and new themes to our gallery as we design more Faux Prints!
Unfortunately, only these three were done, beginning with the monster below.
Bete Biere translates as “Beast Beer,” with the slogan “Ugly But Delicious.”
Biere de Sirene, essentially the Siren’s Beer and the slogan is “Faire attention a l’Appel” or “Heed the Call.”
“Biere Prehistorique,” simply Prehistoric Beer, “Aged to Perfection.”
The first and the third are available for purchase as a poster, but it’s looks like he abandoned the project before the Mermaid was made available.
You can read Olsen’s biography and see his resume. There’s also a portfolio at his personal website and a few more on Coroflot.
Greg says
Nice find Jay. Bummer that he abandoned the project.
Raquel says
Hey Jay,
Erik does indeed live in the bay area (east bay) and has changed gears a bit http://www.ejolsen.com to do more UI/UX stuff.
He still does art here and there, but he never got any comments on his beer posters and was really tickled when he found your post.
He is planning on doing another series of 3 posters soon.
Thanks and I love the blog,
Raquel (Erik Olsen’s wife 😉