To celebrate the 30th bottling, this year’s packaging, for the first time ever, will feature not one, but a series of custom snowflake themed illustrations by Bend, Oregon artist MaryLea Harris.
“I was so honored to be invited to create the label for the 30th anniversary of this beloved beer, and to join the ranks of artists I esteem and admire,” said Harris. “I like to work in series, and landed on creating four snowflake paintings for this project because no two snowflakes are alike just like no two beers are ever exactly alike. It’s exciting to be the first artist to create more than one piece of art for the label and have a mixed and matched set of bottles in each six-pack this year.”
Harris, who specializes in mixed-media and painting, used a complex process to create the Deschutes Snowflake series. She started by layering plaster and acrylic paint applied to a primed canvas with recycled plastic gift cards as scraping tools. As a nod to the history of the brewery and the beer, she tore up Jubelale posters from the past three years along with some local articles about Deschutes Brewery and glued them to the painted background. She then continued to build up layers of paint with brush strokes and liquid acrylic ink drips to achieve the colorful surface. The last step was to paint each snowflake by hand so, as she explains, “so each are unique and full of complexity and detail.”