Here is an example of branding with Blender 3D for a fictional paint company in Portland called Alberta Hues. I am much better at designing cans of paint than I am coming up for names of paint as you can see. These were designed in Blender 3D using a technique that I’ve been using a lot lately, which is extruding circles. I created the sample swatches you see in the foreground and the labeling for the cans in Inkscape, another piece of open-source software. Finally, the paint tarp was done by creating a square picture in Gimp and mapping that texture to a square that I animated to drop down on a stand using physics in Blender. As you can see, I am averse to spending any amount of cash on commercial software as I used the graphic art trifecta of Inkscape for the vector-based design instead of Illustrator, Gimp for texturing as an alternative to Photoshop and Blender 3D instead of shelling out thousands for Maya.
I used a can of paint I had laying around in my garage as the guide for this piece and an old paint swatch that was laying next to it. I should also give credit where credit is due: this wonderful color palette came from the folks at Dwell.com, specifically the Bornstein Bathroom from their Trends piece @ colourlovers.com. I had to give the colors new names to avoid being too derivative.