Agency:
Method1
Client
Heaven Hill / Elijah Craig
Team Members
CD: David Muldoon
ACD: Harrison Weathers
This collection showcases my diverse digital artistry and high-end retouching executed for the Elijah Craig brand over the past 18 months. Working closely with my Art/Associate Creative Director (ACD), I managed and delivered complex imagery across multiple campaigns.
My contributions ranged from extensive full matte paintings and digital art to highly technical product rework. For the latter, I specialized in taking raw photographer files and performing detailed product correction, often involving digital painting, cloning, and color grading to ensure the bottle's color accuracy. A key efficiency deliverable was the creation of a system for digitally applying and swapping product labels, allowing the team to quickly adapt and change products within a consistent visual framework. The final examples included demonstrate how the completed artwork was presented and utilized by the creative team.
Beyond extensive matte painting, the most significant technical challenge was consistently balancing bottle color accuracy against complex natural and artificial lighting environments. In some instances, achieving the correct tonality and highlights required completely cloning out the original bottle and digitally painting the background elements over the initial composite. Furthermore, optimizing 100MB high-resolution files presented consistent challenges regarding file size growth and ensuring that the final output maintained print-ready quality without any loss of detail or integrity.
club house Matt Painting
One of the most technically demanding projects involved the golf clubhouse matte painting. This required an extreme level of digital artistry and precision retouching, as we had to reconstruct the entire scene from the flooring and walls to the exterior background elements. The primary challenge was flawlessly matching the complex perspective and angle of the original photography, demanding meticulous attention to detail to ensure a seamless and believable final composite.
Golf Green
Another challenging project involved an extensive compositing operation where we transformed a simple studio shot into a complex, realistic environment. This required digitally rebuilding the entire scene to mimic a refined table setup placed directly in front of a golf green, demanding seamless blending of studio elements with photorealistic background and environmental textures.
PGA Quail Hollow
To deliver immediate brand representation at the PGA Quail Hollow event prior to the official location shoot, I executed a high-priority environmental composite. This involved acquiring a stock image of the location, seamlessly integrating a hero bottle from our library, and digitally recreating the labels and knecker (neck wrapper) to ensure full brand accuracy within the challenging new environment.
