I don’t have many photos of the original, and the few I do have I am not posting on this post as I posted them on the blog post I made a few months ago detailing all my artwork. But the artwork directly below is the original, and as you can see, the middle part of it got destroyed when I was moving into my apartment in 2022, and I had been meaning to fix it for ages. But I thought, I won’t just fix it, I’ll improve it!

So I started with tracing one of the little cola bottles from the painting so it was identical, which I then painted to patch up the tear in the original. I then had to draw cola bottles similar to the big ones one the original but I had to make them slightly bigger to cover the originals as I knew that would be easier then trying to remove the original ones.

I wanted the big ones on the new one to be more exciting, so I made them all colourful but all the colours have a certain rhythm to them, which I explain better in my artwork blogpost. I didn’t like how it looked at first, but when they’re all together they look a lot more coherent.

I remember this photo was taken the night before my psychosis assessment. I was super scared so I bought new Disney pyjamas and spent the evening cutting lots of little cola bottles for the second cola bottle project; one that was going to compliment the big one!

The first thing I did was draw six big cola bottles, these ones were bigger again to the big ones I made to cover up the first ones in the first painting. I then coloured them in the six colours from the theme of the big painting. After that I cut them out, stuck them onto black cardstock and cut that out too. I wanted these to really pop so I had to layer a lot of layers onto it, but the colour of the cardstock matched.. in a way.

In the first picture here you can see what the first painting looked like once I had redone it. But now I was creating six smaller paintings to go with the first one. I hope one day I have a house big enough to display all of them in a wall together. Anyway, I spent a long time tediously sticking onto coloured card and black card and cutting around them.

I don’t want to say how long it took to cut around every one of those little cola bottles for the background of those six paintings- but this was the final piece. All the coloured are in themes with certain parts of the original, and I really like how they turned out!

So, I had made, drew, painted and meticulously cut out far too many little cola bottles, and I still had a few white ones left. So I coloured those ones in the same way I had coloured the ones in the six matching paintings and backed them with black card and coloured card but instead of backing them onto a background made from a solid colour, I took inspiration from the original and made it multicoloured! I love how it took inspiration from all the cola bottle paintings I had made before it!

I love this little painting, it’s A3 size so much smaller than the original and would actually fit in a standard frame. For the original I have to get a custom made frame and it is turning into quite a headache. I don’t really know what I’m going to do with it yet, but it was much more fun to make than the original as it was so small!