Vintage Nuka Cola Adventure — Print & Oil Painting

The type arrives first and takes the top third. A small script line runs across the upper left, then the brand name sweeps the full width in tall red letters with a long trailing underline, and a price of ten cents sits in the corner. At the foot of the panel, in heavy block capitals, a slogan that puns on the wasteland's favourite verb.

Between the two lines of copy sits the model. She leans back against a stack of tyres and scrap in a wide-brimmed hat and dark glasses, one boot up on a rim, a holster at the hip and a leather jacket over her shirt, drinking with her head tipped back. The pose comes straight out of mid-century advertising. The sidearm does not.

Everything is painted in thick oil, the lettering included, which is why the poster never reads as a printed sheet. The red band behind the type breaks into separate loaded strokes, the sky shows the weave of the canvas, and the scrap in the background is built from short blunt dabs of blue-grey and brown.

The bottom right corner carries the product itself, a Nuka-Cola bottle with its red label, painted like a small still life. The joke underneath the whole thing is that a soft drink kept its advertising voice through the end of the world, and the artist commits to it without winking.

Shelved in our Fallout collection. For the same bottle used quietly instead of as a slogan, see the lamplit portrait of Piper Wright.