ABSTRACT
The interplay of the pictorial and the verbal elements of a magazine advertisement has become a favourite subject for multimodal analysis. In the act of painting the choice of paint colour may have been intuitive rather than deliberate. The summary of the formal and semantic relationships between Pablo Picasso’s painting and the design of the advertizing text surrounding it suggest that the Canon copywriters were very sensitive interpreters of Picasso’s intentions in Girl Before a Mirror. The image of the girl's face in the mirror is a distortion of her natural age and personality, and its colours are gloomy and brooding. The Colour Wizz has Canon's digital technology and bubble-jet printing, which means crisp, vivid copies. The Canon logo in the bottom right hand corner matches the bright red of the banner headlines and mimics with red, yellow and blue rapid paint strokes some of the dominant colours of the painting.
