Quality purveyor of sea monsters, fairytales and ghosts.

Hardangerbonden

Labels for ciders and apple drinks

Close-up of the finished Naken label: a plump watercolour apple bottom with a leaf, and the words alkoholfri sider Hardangerbonden

Hardangerbonden is a farm in Sekse in Hardanger. I designed three labels for their products: Eplebrus, Sprudlande Mamma and Naken, with different illustrations and a collective look.

Client: Hardangerbonden
Year: 2025

Labels for ciders and apple drinks

Sprudlande Mamma

The first design out was “Sprudlande Mamma”.

Pencil sketch of the dancing Champagne lady for the Sprudlande Mamma label, with watercolour colour swatches

Ingrid Sekse, Hardangerbonden, visited my gallery in February and chose illustration styles that she thought would be a good fit for her three different products. For Sprudlande Mamma, she wanted a “Champagne lady”, a joyous celebratory woman dancing about the label.

Pencil lettering tests for Sprudlande Mamma

I love working by hand, where my pencils actually have some friction on paper and lines change with the paper grain.

Sprudlande Mamma lettering being traced on paper against a window, backlit by low spring sunlight

Before I bought my new light board I sketched and traced the lettering on my window backlit by low spring sunlight.

Finished Sprudlande Mamma lettering in red watercolour brush script

Finished lettering for the label, made with watercolour and brush.

Front and back of the finished Sprudlande Mamma label on bottles of sparkling apple drink

Printed the labels over and over again, did some tweaks, and printed again and tweaked some more until I was happy with placement. I also did the typography and layout of the designs.

A bottle of Sprudlande Mamma with a Norwegian flag ribbon, held among white apple blossoms

Finished label on cider bottle!

Naken

Label for non-alcoholic cider made from ice cider production.

Pencil sketch in a sketchbook of the apple bottom idea for the Naken label, with hand lettering of Hardangerbonden and Naken

One of the briefs from Hardangerbonden was to create a label for a non-alcoholic cider named “Naken” (Eng: “Nude”). Sometimes ideas strike and the finished label is actually very close to the initial sketch. Luckily Hardangerbonden was on board with the apple bottom idea above, and I set to work. I wanted to create a look that would connect the three products, a cider, apple soda, and a sparkling apple drink, with different illustrations and a collective look, and I tested hand lettering the brand name and name of the products just to start somewhere.

I placed my apple bottom sketch with the lettering and scanned it, and pushed the contrast to give me a black outline on the illustration.

Test print of the Naken label with a black outline apple bottom on a cider bottle

“Muck around and find out” applied, here I watercoloured in my sketch printout.

Watercoloured test print of the Naken label on a cider bottle, with a watercolour palette behind

Played around with different lettering placements and started working in the additional information with pencil directly onto the bottle.

Naken label test with a watercoloured apple bottom on a cider bottle, on a cutting mat
Lettering tests for Naken and Hardangerbonden with inked apple bottom outlines and watercolour swatches

Lettering and inked out apple bottoms.

Several printouts of the Naken label with layout, barcode and text tests spread out on a table

A few (quite a few) printouts and emails later, we had our label. Along the way we increased the apple bottom’s plumpiness, decreased the leaf, changed the text and changed it again, and played around with the size of the name and type against the apple.

We placed barcodes and content info, and I created a font from my hand lettering so that I didn’t have to letter out everything for each text placement. I also made the font choices for the text blocks, and some additional lettering and smaller illustrations for Hardangerbonden’s “seal of approval”.

Then we emailed some more about the paper quality and lacquer, which turned out sooo pretty for the final label.

Printouts with Hardangerbonden lettered in a circle around the apple, and tests of the seal of approval with Ingrid Sekse’s name

And here is the final result!

Back of the Naken bottle with the product text and the Hardangerbonden seal of approval

Bottoms up 😉

The finished bottle of Naken non-alcoholic cider held up outdoors in front of a hammock

Eplebrus

Label for Hardangerbonden’s apple soda.

The ciders are for sale in my studio at Bryggen, and with Hardangerbonden from their farm in Sekse in Hardanger.

This is a new website, so I’m still working on all the entries about my work. 20 years of books and illustrations take time, so bear with me 😉