I have decided that for my preliminary work I will create a CD cover design.
The backstory is that I have met a boy at volunteering and we became friends - he told me that he likes to sing and write lyrics and that he has a song or two on SoundCloud, so I wanted to do a CD cover for his music. The genre of his songs is alternative/indie. Some of the conventions of indie album covers are: close-up of the artist, name clear on the cover ('CORB'), desaturated/soft colours.
I have decided to put my own twist on the cd cover, not conforming to all indie album artwork conventions, taking the idea of 'soft colours' and 'close-up' and taking them further - I wanted to create a 'dollar' effect on the boy; I did this by opening up illustrator and creating the pattern I have taken a photo of below, then doing this about 6 times while changing the size of the strokes. Then I have created layer masks out of the patterns on the actual photo by editing the threshold of the photos and selecting the darker areas. It was quite hard to figure out how to do it, even though I had found tutorials on the internet - it was more difficult than I expected to follow them.
I took that 'dollar' idea further by adding tigers - passing them through the same technique, but in the end i felt like they looked a bit kitschy (I have also attempted to remove the surplus lines outside of the contour on the tiger on the right), so I ended up removing them altogether - even though they had the same effect applied to them, they did not really fit in with the boy.
I felt as if the upper part of the artwork was too empty - so I took a .png of a CD and edited it in the background to look like a halo.
Furthermore, I added his name on the cover ('CORB') and then what was left to do was to pick colours - the blue and grey contrast the pink and the CD in the background really ties everything in.
Overall, I really enjoyed working on this piece, and while it could have been better, I am quite proud that I learned new things through this experience - such as creating a 'money' effect, importing vectors from Ai to Ps by conerting them into pixels and using simple CMD + C & CMD + V commands (no need to save!!) and how to apply layer masks.
*I have taken the photo used for the CD cover, it is part of a photoshoot that I have also posted in the 'preliminary work' category.
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