The making of my magazine advert!

I found it really hard to find examples of R&B artists magazine advertisements. For my ancillary tasks I have chosen to design both a magazine advert, promoting my artists album, and a digipak. Although my research was unsuccessful, from both knowledge of this area and examples from other genres I found that magazine advertisements tend to be very similar to the album cover, if not the same and simply enlarged (with more detail e.g. release dates and websites). I also found that newer, less established artists don't tend to have an album name, and self title their albums. To make my ancillary tasks as accurate as possible, I decided that my album should be self titled to enhance my end result. Therefore I will not include the name 'Stride' in my magazine advert as it will not be featuring on the digipak. 

I plan to include a close up shot from my photo shoot on the cover of the digipak, and to make my magazine advert as authentic as possible, I will also include an image from this particular shoot in order to keep them consistent.

Add caption

After chosing an image I started to edit it on photoshop. I wanted to achieve an 'airbrushed' effect which tends to be very common for female R&B artists, on both their album covers and in their music videos! As I want my magazine advertisment to follow the same route I chose to produce this effect. To do this I used the 'eyedropper' tool to select the appropriate colours and filled in imperfections by using the brush tool. I used the same process to perfect the lips and brighten the eyes! I also used the eraser tool around the body as the images original background was an 'off-white' colour and didn't blend in with the advertisements clean white background! 

I decided to keep the background of my advertisment white, as the costume Alice is wearing is black, and I didn't want the overall imgage to be too dark! I found it really hard to find appropriate fonts on photoshop, therefore I downloaded a selection from the website dafont. I will most likely use the same font for both my magazine advert and album cover to keep up the consistency. So I decided to look at fonts on album covers, to get a rough idea of what I wanted! They tended to be either quite simple or big and bold (Like Jennifer Hudson's for example) 

Some of my Results:

I started to try out these fonts on my advert, but they just weren't working! I was finding it really difficult to find one that appropriatley fitted the genre whilst looking proffesional! I had first decided to use a Silver font, as I thought that black would be too harsh, however this just wasn't looking powerful OR proffessional enough! Also, with every font I found the name "Leah B" wasn't long enough to use in the style I had wanted to on my digipak, and as I wanted to use the same font, I decided to reconsider the name. I looked back at my previous suggestions but they all seemed a bit too predictable. Although I need to be addressing the typical conventions of the R&B genre, I was starting to think too far into it! I decided to keep things a bit more simple and use my artist's (actress) own name 'Alice Clark.' The letters in this name fitted the fonts better, but still didn't seem to correspond with one another. I then came across a font called Segoe Script in photoshop which almost gives a 'Signature' effect! This still looked a little plain, therefore i decided to add a black banner behind it, and change the font to white. 

This is fits the advertisement a lot better than the previous fonts, and the black and white complements the image I added.
I needed to add a website address to my advert, for listeners to find out more about the artist, I decided to make it simple after researching other R&B artists website addresses.  

The majority tended to feature the artists name and 'online' or 'official' etc. I decided to go for something similar "www.aliceclarkofficial.co.uk" and added it the bottom of my advert. I tried to achieve a similar effect to the title of the artists name, but used a less fancy font in block capitals to avoid making the whole image look too busy. 

I needed to add some information e.g. the release date and the price. I browsed on iTunes for some prices of R&B artists albums. My results showed that £7.99 was a common price for albums by artists similar to my own, therefore this is the price i chose. 

I used a very simple font for this and again, stuck with black. I also decided to mention the name of my track "You've got nerve" as albums and magazine adverts tend to state priority songs that are featured (usually ones with music videos.)

  

I wanted to keep the magazine advert simple, as the examples of R&B artists album covers i found, don't have a lot going on. And if I am going to create something similar for my digipak, my magazine advert will need to correspond to that! This is my final result....!