Winter Reflections.
A composite advertising design.

Grey Goose on ice. Literally. This Photoshop composite started with a simple brief - create a winter wonderland scene - and ended up somewhere between a vodka advertisement and a small personal battle with layers, masks and the laws of reflection.

The frozen lake became the dominant feature for good reason: those ice cracks make perfect leading lines, drawing your eye towards the distant mountain peak and straight into the bottle sitting quietly in the lower right quadrant. The sky frames everything from above, clouds rolling inward to create negative space around the peak. Grey Goose earned its placement on a strong intersecting third, with a major ice line running just behind it to carry your eye further into the scene.

The bottle was the biggest fight - masking, shadow painting, reflection flipping, gradient fading, opacity tweaking, a Curves adjustment, and at one point a mysteriously disappearing mask that had to be done all over again. The sky was built using Multiply blend mode with a gradient mask, roads and fences were removed with the Lasso and Clone tools, and a subtle warm Colour Lookup layer tied the whole scene together. Oh — and there’s a hiker on the far side of the lake. He’s easy to miss. That’s the point.

NZDP102 Composite Advertising Design.