Milestones!

Final Project

I have been working towards one big final photomedia project. This is what I was trying to create:

• An album cover for a hardcore punk band.
  • The album must appeal to youth.
  • The album must look professional.
  • The album must include impressive image manipulation and lighting techniques.

I also wanted to see if I could incorporate something  M.C. Escher styled into the artwork.

This is the finished product –

Before Armor is a made up band.

Milestones

Before starting the project, I came up with some milestones that I thought would be useful for assessing and guiding my project –

1. Finding a direction
2. Taking or finding the appropriate images to alter
3. Arranging the images in Photoshop
4. Editing images together
5. Refining colours and making final touch ups

Finding Direction

I had a bit of trouble deciding what to do for the project, so I followed some tutorials and decided to a CD cover using some kind of manipulated person or animal and use some of the light techniques from the tutorials.

Taking or finding the appropriate images to alter

I found this charming picture that I took a few years ago. This image was great for me because it was clean and the outline of the bird is mostly unaffected. The magpie is beautiful, but it still looks a little mischievous and that would appeal to youth. I also thought the shape looked simple enough that I could manipulate it without attempting to do anything beyond my own means.

Arranging the images in Photoshop

This is me cutting the bird out and cleaning it up a bit –

Editing images together

This section took me a long time to wrap my head around. I got ideas from a few different tutorials including this one and this one.

I finally worked out how I could make the bird curl around like an orange peal. I drew a guide.

Next I cut out the ‘unneeded’ bits (with a raster mask). I drew in some curls (pen tool) and shaded them in (burn overlay).

I added some extra elements as I learned how to do in this tutorial.

I then added lighting effects learned in this tutorial.

Refining colours and making final touch ups

I finally adjusted final colours and made some touch ups.

Crop, title, finished!

It has a bit of a Christmas vibe, perhaps.