Marks & Spencer Christmas Gin Liqueur Snow Globes

I was absolutely delighted to be commissioned by Marks and Spencer to create two illustrated scenes to be printed around their Christmas gin liqueurs.

Photograph of Marks and Spencer Christmas gin bottles with a forest winter woodland scene with trees and deer and stag. A second bottle with a high street Christmassy shop scene

Copyright Marks and Spencer

The bottles themselves are snow globes- the gin contains edible gold leaf and feature an LED light in the base, so when shaken, they become snowy landscapes. I was tasked with illustrating a winter wonderland of animals and trees, and a festive high street scene, including a little M&S shopfront!

A gold and white illustration of a forest winter woodland scene with trees and deer and stag. Foxes, rabbits, hares and robins are standing in the trees. There are robins, sparrows and swallows are flying around.

Winter Woodland Illustration Scene

An illustration of a high street Christmassy shop scene. Several tall decorated buildings and windows with bunting and Christmas trees

High Street Christmassy Scene

The project was fairly straightforward and the exact type of natural and architectural based work that I particularly love to create. The brief itself contained some mocked up rough versions of the types of illustrations they’d like to see, created by the designer at M&S, Ian Robinson. It included some of my own existing work on similar themes. M&S are also releasing some beautiful biscuit tins in the shape of gable front houses, and I was asked to make sure that some of my buildings in the high street scene were reminiscent of these.

I started out by researching winter trees, birds and other animals that could be included in the woodland scene, and Amsterdam gabled houses for the high street, taking inspiration from a trip there a few years back. I then jumped straight into creating the illustrations; starting with sketches before moving on to drawing with a Wacom tablet in Illustrator and layering the elements together.

Photograph of Marks and Spencer Christmas gin bottles with a forest winter woodland scene with trees and deer and stag. A second bottle with a high street Christmassy shop scene. Decorations in the background
Photograph of Marks and Spencer Christmas gin bottles with a forest winter woodland scene with trees and deer and stag. A second bottle with a high street Christmassy shop scene. Decorations in the background

I needed to make sure that there was a good ‘flow’ to the illustrations as you twist the bottles around- making sure that the height of the buildings and trees waved up and down dynamically, and that you would be able to see taller ones in the background through the transparent glass. Once I’d drawn all of the elements I experimented a lot with moving the different pieces around; overlapping trees and joining buildings together in a way that was the most effective. The team at M&S were so helpful with feedback on this. The illustrations also had to be seamless where they joined in the middle of the glass, to form one continuous scene on each bottle.

Photograph of Marks and Spencer Christmas gin bottles with a forest winter woodland scene with trees and deer and stag. A second bottle with a high street Christmassy shop scene

Marks & Spencer have been a dream client of mine for a long time, and this was the perfect brief. It was a wonderful feeling walking into a branch of M&S and seeing my illustrations on the shelves, particularly on such a high end, well produced product. Thanks to my agents at The Artworks!