I still have the email from the Caveman Foods brand manager: “Not sure how, but getting some kind of BBQ in the Spicy BBQ would be great. See what you can do.” I had been fooling around with different variations on the ingredients for the new Caveman Foods Chicken Primal Bar packages. The combinations of ingredients … Read More
Photography or Illustration? Choosing illustration vs photography is a fundamental decision when thinking out a new food packaging design. Sometimes you want to use illustration because your competitors are using photography. Illustration can add an element of fantasy, depicting the taste as it exists in the imagination of the consumer. A painting can also add a precious and … Read More
Cave men didn’t have cameras, so Caveman Foods wanted the art for the Chicken Primal Bars to look hand-painted, yet a little more realistic than the usual work others were doing on walls of caves. They wanted the art realistic because humans were such visual creatures. Just seeing the sparkling, tasty ingredients would make human mouths water. Not to mention that … Read More
The new Chips-It box, designed by branding agency, Gauger and Associates, won awards in the 2017 Graphis Design Annual for packaging design—with an illustration by Paul Mirocha.
Up until early 2015, cave men ate this: Then the CaveMan brand nutrition bars evolved a bit, they got a new logo, and substituted a photograph for the see-through window. But the packaging was still not quite working. The bars were actually really good once you opened one and bit into it, but they didn’t photograph well. The … Read More
MONARCH BUTTERFLIES: they are identifiable by any school child. And they are common as robins and daisies, right? Not necessarily. Don’t take anything beautiful for granted. Scientists have documented a 90% decline in numbers of this iconic species since the mid-1990s. Part of this is because of over-use of herbicides on farms, yards, and roadsides … Read More
Color is pretty, but usability is even better. Even in this highly technological age of rich media, there is a place for the simplicity of pen and ink. I created this scratchboard-style illustration of a Monarch butterfly for the Make way for Monarchs campaign. There will be color versions in the future, but I … Read More
Two recent additions to the new line of organic Alvita herbal tea packages. I think I have now painted almost every medicinal plant used in commercial teas. I try to sample the teas when I am working on them, but just painting these beautiful plants is therapeutic in itself. After about 35 of these packages, … Read More
Herb Garden, my page for the Natural Science Illustration section of the upcoming Medical Illustration Sourcebook no. 27
Alvita Designs Web Site Around New Botanical Illustrations by Paul Mirocha When I run out of design ideas, I often turn to botany. Plants always come through for me as design solutions when all else fails. Each plant species is a beautiful, elegant design solution in itself, a variation on the theme for its botanical … Read More
Botanical art for a new tea package design See more of Paul’s botanical illustrations for vintage and re-branded Alvita packages. For years, I used to admire the design of Alvita Tea packages whenever I was in a high-end health food store, with the legacy white boxes featuring botanical paintings. With 46 different herbs, the … Read More
I spent the last week of March in Prescott, Arizona, as artist in residence at Skyview, a unique charter school based on Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences. That means every student takes art and music. I call my workshop Drawing is Seeing. The title states my approach in simple terms. Drawing helps us observe things around … Read More
Cytosport is a major manufacturer of sports nutrition products. Their line of Muscle Milk bars are enough to make one decide to go to the gym and start working out– if only to have a good excuse to eat lots of them. They have the same amount of protein that’s in a hamburger, but basically … Read More
The wild side is probably somewhere in your neighborhood. Gather plants as you walk and cook them up for dinner. Don’t worry that most of them are weeds. Don’t criticize until your tasted them. I drew these botanical illustrations for Carolyn Niethammer’s recent book Cooking the Wild Southwest. It’s actually an updated and rewritten … Read More
Twinlab is a major manufacturer and marketer of sports nutrition products. Responding to an evolving market, the brand managers decided that the next generation of nutritional drinks would need to be for the mass market, appealing to both women and men, and be free of all artificial flavors, colorings, sweeteners, and questionable or banned substances. … Read More
Corry’s Snail and Bug Death comes in a package that has been around since the 1930s and has a lot of brand recognition. When Corry’s asked Ron Rifkin of The Design Office in Oakland to update the classic design, he decided the illustration needed some help too. Still, it was very important that loyal customers … Read More
Anyone who browses at high-end health food stores has seen Alvita Tea packages, featuring their recognizable botanical watercolor art on white, and the dark blue branding on the box layouts. You can’t help noticing them–the plants are so beautiful and appealing to the eye and the design so simple and elegant that it stands out … Read More
You can see my painting of Titanoboa, the largest snake on Earth in the April 2012 edition of Smithsonsian Magazine. The biggest, at least as far as we know: it lived a safe 58 million years ago. When the editor from Smithsonian Magazine contacted me with a rush job, they had tried photography of a … Read More
This past spring, I was invited to be the artist in residence at Tumamoc Hill, “Hill of the Horned Lizard”, a Sonoran Desert preserve owned by the University of Arizona. I bought a sketchbook and dedicated it only to drawing on this hill. This is an open ended project, but in return for use of … Read More
When Cytosport, maker of Muscle Milk® protein bars, decided to launch a new series of bars with a new package design, they tried photography first. But to represent their product in the most delicious way possible, they needed a blend of realism and fantasy. That was a job for illustration. It had to look as … Read More