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).