Planning my Advertisement

After concluding research and planning, I was finally ready to begin working on the creation of my own advertisement.

I decided to photograph one of my friends in the park reading a Marvel comic. Being the photographer allowed me to capture the moment exactly as I envisioned it. The background of the original picture included the leaves in the park, which made the process later on way more challenging. I asked my friend to wear dark coloured clothes so it can create contrast with the comic later on. My friend has really fair skin which acted as an advantage as there was contrast between her skin and the clothes but also the comic she was holding. We were satisfied with the shots taken from my iPhone 8 plus camera. It was a challenge for us to take a good shot as we had many difficulties in the park. One of the difficulties we encountered was that the background was that the background was distracting from our image. This took away a lot of focus from the comic which wasn’t ideal. Another obstacle we faced was that whenever we had a good background, the lighting was terrible. Therefore, in this case we prioritized lighting over background and I decided that the background would be edited later on.

Here is the image unedited:

After completing the photography, it was time for me to edit the picture. Looking at the picture closely, I noticed that there was a lot of light focused in the middle of my model's forehead. I was not concerned by this since that the part with the excessive light would be covered by the Spiderman’s mask to hide the imperfections of the picture.

The first step was to import my picture into Photoshop. I selected the document to be a ‘print’ one so the resolution could be higher. I chose an A4 paper as I was working on an advertisement, converted my image into normal layer and dropped it into my canvas. I was then ready to start editing.

I adjusted the size of the picture and cropped it a little bit to centre the comic as much as possible.  I used the ‘brush tool’ to fill in the background of my picture. Zooming into the picture helped me with more precise results and as I was moving along, I also adjusted the size of the brush tool for the details. This was more challenging than I expected, especially around the hair, as I couldn’t get the results to be very realistic. In the final image, it still bothers me that you can see the brush strokes around her hair.

After filling in the background, the next step for me was to transform part of her face into Spiderman. I couldn’t import any picture from Google as that would be considered copyright infringement, so I used a website called ‘Unsplash’ and searched for Spiderman images that are not copyrighted. 'Unsplash' results were very limited which meant that I didn’t have enough options to work with. Additionally, my model had her head tilted a certain way, which was very challenging to match the tilt with one of the images of Spiderman. Thankfully, I found an image I could work with. I inserted the image into a new file, cropped it and dropped it into the file I was working on. Adding the picture on top of her face looked very unrealistic, therefore I decided that I would sketch some additional parts by hand.

I started sketching the connection between my models face and the Spiderman image where she transforms and used different shades of red to make it look more 3D. Using the ‘Mixer Brush tool’ I blended everything together to create shadows. I also picked up a brown shade using the brush tool and used it to trace the outline of the mask so as to create a shadow between the mask and the skin, and also used light shades to add highlights to some points. The mask blending with the face was one of the most challenging parts of the advertisement. It took me about an hour of blending and adjusting the mask to be satisfied with the result.  The mask doesn’t look very realistic, which was the result I was aiming for as I wanted it to be clearly identified as a comic.

The last step to complete my advertisement was to add the title and the slogan. I used ‘Unsplash’ again to download the logo of Marvel and dropped it into my canvas. I cropped it and added it to the top left corner of my poster as it had plenty of room to be displayed there. For the text, I tried to find the closest font to Marvel’s actual font, which in this case was ‘Impact’. I adjusted the size of the letters to 24px and added it below the logo.

I then saved my file as .PSD so I could insert it into my blog.

Conclusion: I really liked the fact that I had the opportunity to try out Photoshop. My research also gave me initial insights into the importance of colours, fonts and slogans in advertisements. Compared to my last project, I was more organized and prepared. However, I still encountered many unexpected obstacles. Background seems to be an ongoing issue for me, therefore, for the next project I will plan out different scenarios in case one doesn’t work out. I liked the fact that this project pushed my boundaries and challenged me. In the next post, I will show my final results with comments.

Reference:

https://unsplash.com/ to find my images