Process
I needed to create a memorable and unique ad campaign leveraging the work of a renowned artist to drive brand sales. The artist’s work needed to align with Blue Moon’s brand identity, allowing for meaningful and seamless connection.
Assets
My approach for this design was to interpose a bottle of Blue Moon into the paintings selected for the ad campaign, so I began by searching for well-known paintings that feature objects which could be easily switched out for the bottle.
I wanted the artwork to be easily recognizable, so I began with the most famous paintings I could think of, hoping to leverage their familiarity to enhance the impact of the design. However, most of these were either too stylized or did not present a natural opportunity to incorporate the beer bottle.
Since Blue Moon produces Belgian ale, I decided to try looking for Belgian artists, which led me to Renee Magritte, the perfect choice for this collaboration. His paintings often center around small objects which are presented in a surprising or captivating way, leaving ample opportunities for the bottle switch. Magritte’s surrealist style also meshed well with Blue Moon’s brand identity.
Photoshop Composites
I created photoshop composites which integrated the Blue Moon bottle into the Magritte paintings I selected. Each of these required me to remove an object from the original painting, using a combination of the remove and the clone tools, and then superimpose the Blue Moon Bottle. The bottle needed to be masked to remove the background, and additional adjustment layers applied to tweak the colors and provide the appropriate sense of depth. Shadows also needed to be added in some instances and grain applied to make the bottle appear seamlessly as a part of the painting.
Solution
I integrated the bottle into each painting, with a headline placed according to the specific context. I chose the typeface Farnham for use in the headlines, as it meshed well with Blue Moon’s existing branding and typefaces while also providing a stern, yet whimsical attitude for the witty headlines. The paintings were cropped or modified differently for each context in order to create the appropriate layout. Some of the ads required me to expand the original painting using Adobe Firefly in conjunction with the clone tool in Photoshop.