Album Cover

Before my partner and I begin to design a digipak, as well as posters using Photoshop, I thought it would be a good idea to get to know the software. I have created some CD covers in spare time using a variety of the tools and features of the programs.

With this first cover, I had to use the magnetic lasso tool in order to highlight the artist - Tyler, the Creator - and delete the background; in order to make the edges look smoother I used the blur tool, so that the image would look like there was a transition between foreground and background instead of one image looking as if it has been pasted directly on to another. Next, I simply used text tool to create a text box in which I copy and pasted the group name 'OFWGKTA'; then I rotated this and changed the colour and font size. The way in which I made one OFWGKTA stand out was by creating a new text box in a new layer, making the font the same size and manually moved it over one of the background 'OFWGKTAs'. I then used the outer glow tool to give it a glow and after used the brush tool to add the effect of the word bleeding/melting.

After this effort, I decided that I would like to try out some of the filters that are available using Photoshop. I started out with this image: 

Again I needed to remove the background so I went through the same process of using the magnetic lasso tool to select the artist, and remove the background. As the artist sometimes goes by the name of 'Scorcher Skywalker' I thought that Skywalker would be a suitable as the album title. I used a futuristic font for the title, because Skywalker connotes Star Wars which has themes of space travel etc. so I thought it would be appropriate. I kept the artists name quite small as his image is very much the focus of the cover and people buying the album would generally know who the CD was by, immidiately after seeing his face. I decided to use a silhouette of the London Skyline as the background because Skyline has connotations with the 'sky' in Skywalker, but also because the artist is a London rapper so it shows a connection to his roots. Finally, I used filters to create this brush stroke effect on the image, as well as reducing the saturation of this layer to reduce the vibrancy of the colour of his jacket, as it contrasted too heavily against the black background and text.