Advertising for People Who Know Nothing about Advertising

I created this ad to advertise my chain mail jewelry business.

To create my ad, I first set up a photo on my coffee table of some chain mail jewelry that I had lying around my house. The two bracelets and choker are the first experiments I did with that style of mail. I put down black fabric over a book and laid the jewelry over it to give the layer that it seems to have toward the back right corner of the ad.

I first moved the picture onto the Photoshop document, since it needed to be 7.5 in by 10 in. It definitely was not, so I had to resize the picture to fit it into the required size. Luckily, it did not need to be cropped, so I had my base all ready to go.

The back right corner looked awkward because the ends of the bracelets stopped before the end of the page. I only had a normal lens camera, so the picture doesn’t look very 3D. The back of the bracelet seemed on a plane with the front. In order to create an artificial sense of depth, I darkened the right corner with the gradient tool. To my surprise, this created a new layer with all the non-black space turning white. I set the blending mode to multiply to let the picture shine through.

The jewelry I used was all silver, so my picture was pretty visually boring. Black and white, yippee. So I decided to add some color to it. I needed to ad the color from my logo, so that when I put the logo into the ad, it wouldn’t seem out of place. (It still seems out of place, but not in color.) I used the dropper tool to copy color from my logo and the brush to color the different rings in a new layer for each color. ONE BY ONE. It was very tedious, but it worked out pretty well. Well, once I set the blending mode to vivid light. Before I did that it looked pretty mediocre.

But woe was me! The color stood out over the gradient. (Now I realize that I should have just moved the color layer behind the gradient layer, but I was in despair! That idea didn’t come to me.) What I did to fix this was use the marquee tool to section out the back of the color layer (back meaning top, right corner) and then use Adjustments -> Brightness/contrast to darken the back manually. I darkened it in two sections, the one closest to the front being less dark, trying to blend it a bit better.

The black background of the original picture was very grainy due to low camera quality. I made a new layer and started coloring the black space black with the brush. I originally tried to use the magic wand and quick select tool and fill the space, but it was so grainy and strangely reflective of colors that it wouldn’t select what I wanted it to. Also I would have had to click the inside of each ring to select it. I reduced the opacity of the black layer so that the contrast wasn’t so jarring and the background was smoother.

Then it was time to add text. I used the text box tool to add a textbox and changed the font to some fancy looking script. I really dislike the use of ellipses, but it looked wrong without them. I was trying to come up with a better ad pitch, but deadlines hit us all hard. I’m sure it’s like that in the advertising industry, too.

I moved the logo from the tab where I opened the logo image and moved it onto the ad. It looked really awkward compared to the sleek, sophisticated style of the ad. I reduced the opacity of the logo in an attempt to make it look a little softer.