A few months back I found photos of a 1970’s Hansell’s Jungle Juice jar I remembered from childhood, online in a Flickr collection of Kiwiana. I was beavering away trying to recreate the label design from the samples of it I’d downloaded, but having a lot of problems getting it right.
One problem with trying to revive the images on cans and jars, is that no matter how you try to reverse the angles and far-shortening that are created by the curvature of the object it is adhered to, it’s never very good and a lot of objectivity is required to straighten it back out when re-drawing it. The other problem was, that something that hardly ever happens occurred – the file corrupted and kept crashing my software as well as my computer so I had to abandon it after getting halfway through the painstaking work – and after trying everything I could think of to remedy it. Annoying not to mention tedious!
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When I left a comment explaining what I was attempting to do, the author of the images said “I can do better than that!” and very kindly e-mailed me four different shots he had taken especially for me to work with, showing the whole design from different views. Brilliant! After that I started from scratch and my job was much easier, and here it is recreated in perfect detail.
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Note: Due to repetitive theft by those who take my intellectual property from this blog without my permission, and reproduce it as merchandise for sale on sites such as Ebay, Redbubble and Trade Me, I have now watermarked this image. If you are interested in purchasing merch of this image you can head to my personal Redbubble store.
One thing about starting this blog is that it has immediately brought me in touch with a variety of really interesting people from collectors to historians. I guess it is still quite a niche area and I have no idea who is out there and what their areas of interest are (apart from the same couple of people on Trademe that I seem to be constantly doing battle with – and often losing to – over certain items).
Stephen is an expert in Kiwi cereal premiums (free gifts – often collectable plastic toys) and specialises in collecting not only that genre, but also Hansell’s memorabilia. In 2006 he published “New Zealand Cereal Toys, 1950 – 2000” with Peter Fisher to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first accurately recorded New Zealand cereal toy.
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Richard Wolfe’s many more general Kiwiana books aside, This particular book was the first of its kind for New Zealand – spurred by an explosion in the area of premium collecting in Australasia as people self-indulgently wallow in the rosy glow of a distant childhood. Not many luxuries are cheap, but this is one (but rapidly becoming more costly by the year I’m finding).
The full colour book sold out quite a while back, but Stephen has two remaining copies for sale, of the black and white edition – available for NZ $49.95 + $6.00 PP. But these are the last two.
There’s a synopsis here http://www.wheelers.co.nz/books/9780473113629-new-zealand-cereal-toys-1950-2000/#desc ,
and you can see stephen’s collection on-line here. http://www.flickr.com/photos/48502235@N08/collections/72157623667541858/
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I’ll cover Hansells with more depth later in the year when I have time to revisit it.
longwhitekid 