I was thinking the same. The angles and proportions of the objects, especially the caps and the wooden crate, are really wonky. It’s like it was drawn by a person who has never practiced art. There’s no instinct here.

In art school you spend countless hours learning how to stop drawing circles like that.

what I’ve started doing is questioning the circumstances under which media like this would be made in the real world. this affects:

• budget
• style
• artefacts (e.g. digitisation, raster, compression)

The image in the post gives off a “old, high budget” vibe, imo. It’d probably have been made as a poster by some company that existed lots of decades ago and then digitised through scanning.

So, it’s weird that:

• There is no logo that links the company to the poster
• There are no signs of the poster medium (e.g. creases, smudges, print artefacts)
• Bottles aren’t properly aligned
• White is not perfectly white (white paper scans white)

Isn’t the wicking property supposed to come into why the rag’s stuffed in there? To help light and keep the rag from going out?

It depends on how wide the neck of the bottle is. Stuffing the rag into it is generally more efficient and makes sure the rag doesn’t go out when thrown. But, if it’s a wide necked bottle the rag has a greater chance of falling out mid flight which doesn’t help anyone.

You can also tape the heads of strike anywhere matches to the outside of the bottle so it doesn’t have to be burning when you throw it. But this has a relatively high failure rate. And requires the bottle to strike a hard surface.