Tuesday’s ad is for Schlitz, from 1954. This one is also football-themed, with a man at the game, being poured two beers from cans to wash down the hot dogs, already in his hands, as his significant other waits with the blanket and a pennant in the background.
Tuesday’s ad is for Schlitz, from the 1960s, when they debuted the “Aluminum soft top” can, which according to the ad was much easier to open than the “old hard way.” They billed it as the “world’s easiest opening beer can!” I’m not sure about their prophecy that “Some day all beer cans will open this easy!” Time seems to have passed by that innovation.
Today’s work of art is a thoroughly original, unique work of contemporary art. The medium is not paint, but “stitched commercial wool felt combined with needle and traditional wet felting.” The Portland, Oregon artist, LeBrie Rich, originally created it as a window display for the local knitting shop Knit-Purl. Hard as it is to believe, everything except the aluminum tv dinner tray and the plastic fork is made of felt.
Appropriate for today, the work also includes a football game on the felt television.
And, of course, there’s a beer. In this case, the TV dinner is paired with a can of Hamm’s.
And finally, here’s the TV dinner itself. Hungry? Probably a lot of fiber.
To learn more about LeBrie Rich, check out the biography and resume on her own website. And there’s a short profile on Craft Corps. She also has some of her other items for sale on Etsy, and his online store Penfelt.
In honor of today being “Beer Can Day,” the anniversary of the first beer can’s introduction by the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Co. of Newark, New Jersey on January 24, 1935, here’s an amazing use of a beer can. Now this is recycling, or perhaps more correctly repurposing.
For many years, people having been making what are called “pinhole cameras” out of a variety of materials, really anything that keeps out light can be used. Essentially, they’re a very simple, homemade camera. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition. “A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperture – effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box.” But they’ve become very popular again in the last ten or so years, a kind of backlash as a result of the rise of digital photography. There’s as simple and low-tech as possible, yet still create interesting images.
At least two photographers have been in the news lately, making time-lapse photographs with pinhole cameras made from beer cans. The first, a student at the University of Hertfordshire — Regina Valkenborgh — put her beer can camera “next to the university’s radio telescope at its Bayfordbury Observatory.” According to the Daily Mail, the pinhole camera recorded the sun’s movements over a six-month period of time, “[f]rom solstice to solstice, this six month long exposure compresses time from the 21st of June till the 21st of December, 2011, into a single point of view.” How cool is that?
The second, photographer Justin Quinnell, was featured on the Discovery Channel’s website. He’s captured a variety of time-lapse pinhole images using “emptied beer cans and about 50 cents worth of other supplies, such as duct tape and regular photography paper. While the cameras only took about five minutes to build, they had to withstand six months of ‘wind, rain, hail, and being thrown in the trash.'”
When asked which beer cans he preferred, Quinnell responded. “My choice would be lager or Guinness although often, when I teach larger groups, I have to rely on what is left in my neighbors recycling boxes.”
This photo is of Saint Mary Redcliffe Church, in Bristol, England, from December, 19 2007 to June 21, 2008.
This one is of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, also in Bristol, from December 17, 2007 through June 21, 2008.
And this last one was taken by the gravestones of Blance, Grace and Dorcus, over three months in the spring 2008 in the Eastville Cemetery, Bristol, England.
You can many more of Justin Quinnell’s work at his website, pinholephotography.org, including a galley of more from the Slow Light Collection, which is where the above photos came from.
Now that’s a pretty cool use of beer cans. Happy Beer Can Day!
UK-based illustrator Joe Wilson, whose clients include such high-powered companies as Adidas, British Airways, De Beers, GQ, Random House and Wired, designed the new artwork adorning the new 21st Amendment Brewery beer cans. So given his work for Wired, I suppose it’s no surprise that they featured his art on their Underwire Blog in a post entitled Chimp Astronaut Spaces Out in 21st Amendment Brewery’s ‘American Icon’ Artwork.
In an e-mail interview for the post, Wilson talked about the project. Regarding Bitter American. “That was a nice idea to center it around Ham the Astrochimp, who was undoubtedly a bitter American.”
The brewery’s marketing firm, TBD Agency, hired Smith on the strength of a Statue of Liberty illustration he did for Public Finance magazine. “They asked me to create a series of images based around the loose theme ‘American icons,'” Wilson said. “They already had the names of the beers, so this was a case of coming up with American subject matter and giving it a twist.”
21st Amendment wanted to establish a cheeky alternative to its mainstream competitors and that’s precisely what Wilson delivered with his drawings of the space chimp and other American icons. For the history-on-a-can theme, Wilson drew Paul Revere (for a black IPA called Back in Black), Abe Lincoln and his Mount Rushmore companions (Brew Free or Die IPA), the Statue of Liberty (Hell or High Watermelon wheat beer) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (Fireside Chat winter spiced ale).
Below are Wilson’s original sketches followed by the finished can label for each beer.
It’s cool to see the changes — look carefully — from rough sketch to finished artwork. You can see more of Joe Wilson’s artwork at his website and at debut art.
Here’s a fun one. These are the kinds of press releases that help me get into the spirit of the holidays. The Percy Street Barbecue, a Philadelphia restaurant specializing in barbecue, also carries “over 60 varieties of canned beer” that they serve in custom galvanized steel buckets. Order 5 cans, and the 6th one is free.
For Christmas this year, they created an 8-foot tree made entirely of beer cans, over 400 in all. It “took General Manager Aric Ferrell and Desiree Howie, a staff member and local artist, over 12 hours to assemble.”
Now that’s the spirit. Who’s thirsty now.
(photos by Drea Rane.)
Friday’s ad is a 1960 ad for Budweiser cans, showing the “Smart way to buy Bud … Pick a Pair.” The ads shows a housewife, oddly backlit, picking up a six-pack of Bud cans.
Friday’s ad is from 1963, and is for Budweiser cans, specifically six-packs of cans. You gotta love the sixties fashion and that hairdo. Doesn’t she look happy picking up two six-packs?
Here’s another fun design project by Minnesota illustrator David Schwen. It’s a poster depicting nine beer cans representing characters from across varying pop cultures. The identity of some of the cans are fairly obvious while others were inscrutably unknown to me, presumably because I’ve become more old curmudgeon and less with-it-hipster (though to be fair I was happily never one of the cool kids). I can say with certainty I knew 6 of 9 — itself a pop reference — or one-third of them right off the bat. Two more I figured out, more or less, and the remaining one I never got, though now that I know it, it makes sense. Think you know them all? Leave a comment identifying all nine.
You can even buy a print of the poster in five different sizes at Society 6.
Recycle Now, the organization putting on Recycle Week, which begins today, also has a very cool little animated video showing the process that beer cans go through during the recycling process.
Cans – how they are recycled from RecycleNow on Vimeo.