We recently created an ad campaign to promote the San Diego Museum of Art’s annual fundraiser, Art Alive—June 12 – 14, 2009. During the event, florists will choose a piece of artwork and then reinterpret it in a unique floral design. These designs are then put on display for the public.

Through our research we discovered that the biggest problem facing Art Alive is awareness. Most of the general public doesn’t know what the event is, so we needed to educate them.

We presented comps of our ideas and decided to move forward with the campaign entitled Artist’s Tools (trompe l’oeil visuals of art tools made from flowers). See comps below.

Because SDMA is a non-profit, they didn’t have money to pay the photographer and floral designers we needed to produce the ads—we had to improvise.

Since we ARE a creative agency, we decided to do the floral design and photography ourselves.

1. Step One—visit Home Depot, Wholesale Floral Market and Michael’s and get the flower supplies needed to create the ad visuals. This part involved lots of research to see what type of flowers would work and definitely took the longest.

2. Step Two—constructing the visuals. In an open area outside we began piecing together the visuals. I’m not gonna lie, there was a lot of t&e to get each one to work and the sacrifice of a few houseplants was involved. Here’s what we did for each shot.

Palette – I made the palette out of mulch and then photographed the potted plants on top of it using a ladder. I put it on a white background to mimic that of the ad.

Paintbrush – I used palms from a backyard Queen Palm to latch together sea grass (the handle) and orange flowers (the brush). I created two brushes, but decided to go with the more traditional brush as opposed to the fan brush. Again, it was so big I had to shoot it from the top of the ladder.

Paint Tube – I bought a paint tube and applied flower petals to it, using adhesive tape to keep them in place. Problem was the petals kept wilting (agh!) so I wound up applying them in strips and putting each strip in the fridge as I finished to keep fresh. I also photographed a few different types of flowers to use as the “paint” coming out of the tube and wound up going with the heathers.

3. Step Three—photoshop. We went back and touched up each image. The majority of work was done on the paint tube, including replacing the purple flowers which had wilted and curled with some other pink ones from the backyard.

4. Step Four—finish. We laid out the ads for each print and on-line and our talented production department created the hi-res versions. They then were whisked-off to their respective pubs.

Check out some of the finished print ads below—and don’t forget to attend Art Alive June 12 – 14 in Balboa Park.