Make a Vintage Magazine Ad in Photoshop

Im a big fan of vintage magazine ads. Aside from the retro look they present, its interesting to me to see how far the design industry has come over the years. Aside from being a fan of vintage ads, Im also a big fan of old school pinup art. While I was researching vintage ads for this Photoshop tutorial, I came across a few Coppertne Sunscreen ads that were the perfect combination of pinup and vintage ad.

Step 1

When recreating vintage pieces like this, it is important to do your research so that you create something that is true to the period. This is the ad that I found to use as inspiration for this tutorial:

Step 2

Before I start actually working on the design in Photoshop, I like to first gather any image I may need for the design. For this tutorial, all my main images came from Shutterstock.

Pinup Girl Photo
Background Texture
Coppertone Girl(Not Shutterstock)

Step 3

Create a new document in Photoshop with the follow specs:

Step 4

Open your background graphic and paste it as a new layer on your document.

Step 5

My background graphic was a bit to orange-ish looking for me. So I adjusted the hue/saturation of the image to make it a little more white.

Step 6

Now add your main pin up girl image above the background layer. Depending on your image, you may have to cut out or erase some of the background.

Step 7

To make the image look like it is part of the add and printed on our background layer, all we have to do is adjust the layer properties. Change the Blend Mode for this layer to Multiply.

Step 8

At this point I went ahead and threw in the image of the Coppertone Baby. All I did here was download the image listed in step 1 and cut out the background. Nothing to major.

I also added the tag line from our example ad with the font: Bakery Script (paid) There is a free script that is somewhat similar called Oliver

Step 9

While our example ad doesn’t sport this feature, I noticed many older ads had their text in a white box. So, to make better use of the space in this ad, I decided to add a white text box. To make it blend a little better I reduced the Transparency of this layer to 72%.

Step 10

Next we need to erase the portion of the box that is covering up our model. To do this, you need to Rasterize the white box layer.

After you rasterize the layer, it is just a matter of using the Eraser Tool to erase the portion of the white box that covers up the model.

Step 11

All I did here was add some more sales copy to the white text box area. I used a basic Arial font here.

Step 13

I noticed in a lot of other vintage ads that the designers liked to underline calls to actions and important text. So to fill up space and keep the ad true to the time, I added a underlined called to action using the same font as the tag line.

Step 14

I also noticed in other vintage ads that sometimes there was a border around the entire ad. I thought this would finish off the ad nicely. To do this, I drew a square shape with rounded corners. I made the object just a touch smaller than the image and centered it on the page.

Step 15

Create a new blank layer under your pinup girl layer. Go back to the rounder square layer and Select the layer.

Next, in the Toolbar, go to Select > Inverse

Step 16

Click on your blank layer that you create in the last step and use the Fill Tool to fill that layer with White. Then delete the rounded square layer.

Step 17

To put the finishing touches on the ad, I just added the company name to the bottom of the page. Your final image should look something like this: