Vintage Halloween Ad Art

It’s no secret, I have a fondness for vintage ads and pretty artwork – especially from the 50’s and 60’s.

I was thinking of someway to incorporate this appreciation into classic Halloween decor, nothing cheesy or short-lived. I wanted to make something I could display each year, with it continuing to be timeless.

As a subscriber to Newspapers.com, I always come across fun advertisements  – Halloween ads sure didn’t disappoint!

I had a few to choose from, I was mainly looking for Canadian and local ads; something more sentimental. We all know my first gut instinct is to always go for the Eaton’s variety – however I went with a classic Kresge ad and a full newspaper ad for the premier of “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” from 1966.

Here were a few others I loved:

There were a few ads where the artwork was amazing, however the copy would be considered quite politically incorrect these days.

How to make your own Vintage Halloween Ad Art

• Choose your desired company to order your canvas from. I used Picaboo.com
• Choose the size of your canvas (I made a 16 x 24 Portrait Canvas for Linus & Lucy. 10 x 15 Portrait Canvas for Kresge’s)
• Find an ad you want to create into a canvas, that will work for your canvas size
• Open the ad in Photoshop – resize to 300 resolution (image> image size)
• Tweak the colour, you may want to change the mode to greyscale … and then to CMYK (Because printers don’t print in RGB)
• Rotate, straighten and crop your ad so it’s exactly what you want – depending on the ad you choose you may need to add a background layer colour in behind. This ensures perfect coverage for your wrapped canvas.
• Save your image as a high resolution .jpg
• Open Picaboo and upload your photo into the software.
• Bada boom, bada bing!

My “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” ad came out a bit off centre. Picaboo customer care was great, I sent them an email and a few photos – they got back to me really quickly and a new and improved canvas is on its way (free of charge).

Any ad ideas you would create?