One Star Ranch restaurant is one of the best barbeque restaurants in Atlanta. While I was working as a graphic designer for Jezebel Magazine, I was approached about creating an ad for them to run in the magazine. I was given the restaurants logo (a star in a ring – a Texas star) and was asked if I could make it look like it was branded into the background of the ad. The owner also requested a red background. I began playing around with the layout and the logo and decided to try turning the logo into a ‘white-hot branding iron’.

Now we didn’t have the time or the budget to go out and actually have the logo created into a branding iron and the furnace set up to heat the thing up, so I used the next best option – Photoshop. Below are the steps that the iron went through to becoming a smoking, white hot, searing iron.

The handle and the mounting bracket are created here. The general shape was drawn out and a stock photo of a real white-hot iron was used for sampling of colors, textures, weight, and atmosphere. Using a variety of tools, I built up the shape, roundness, and depth of the handle.

Next, we see one of the smoke layers. These images are simplified and somewhat flattened down for convenience – there are actually far more layers and steps and the image developed as more of a whole than separate parts. The smoke is created with brushes (set to different opacities, shapes, flows), smudge, burn and dodge, and eraser tools to build up the smoke in layers and densities. These are all built up behind the main body of the iron.

The One Star branding head is beginning here. This layer builds the basic form and texture of the iron. It is still quite flat at this stage, but building on textures, burning and dodging to create depth and shape.

Here is where the iron is really starting to take on its form, weight, thickness, and heat. More sampling of textures and fine tuning of the tonalities and shadings give it its form.

Lastly, we add another layer of smoke. This is emitted from the front surface of the iron and really begins to show the intensity of the heat. Now it is just a matter of dropping it into the ad. Overall this took about 5 hours to create a realistic looking branding iron (a whole lot faster than having a real one made, heated and photographed – and lots cheaper).

Here is the final ad as it ran in Jezebel magazine.