Only recently did I decide on the font to use (actual text and colour had been chosen, but not the font)

The only reason I didn't put it here sooner is because it wasn't a font on my laptop, but whilst in a bit of a panic about it earlier I discovered that I could download fonts online so I could have more fonts, which is pretty cool! It meant I could get on with a lot more stuff than I thought I would have been able to today.

Although not a technical term, something just looks so right about the lettering for 'Tumbleweed'

I'm nearly finished with the ancillary products

Tomorrow I shouldn't need to do much and I was testing exactly what I am planning to do tomorrow on a free trial of photoshop elements...

I changed the mode of the eclipse tool to 'fixed ratio' to ensure I got a perfect circle.

I then created a gradient (colours will probably change tomorrow! as I want it to be bold and colourful but not garish) 

Selected the tool to make a circular 'target' style gradient. 

I held the mouse in the middle of the circle and then dragged it outward to create the target which I think would look cool for the actual Cd housing in my digipak 

I played around with the paint bucket tool afterwards and actually think this works SO much better and I really like this and intend to use something very similar tomorrow when finishing my digipak!

My plans!

Aren't my originals as they ended up lost from the folder of everybody's in college so I am redoing them now trying to stick as much to my original design as possible so that you can see how my idea progressed! 

Please have mercy on these bad drawings as I have an eye infection!

Almost complete digipak

Over the Holidays...

I have been hating myself so much aha! I had completed a fair bit of my album cover by the end of last term, putting in a lot of detail ect, I HAVE chosen my font its just a Windows one and so my Mac based programmes don't have it.

Album front before Holidays.

Thats what I had, and I wanted a pot of sunshine at the end of the rainbow, to go with the whole title of the album ect and to reinforce the genre / our buyers as being not materially driven ect and thus the traditional gold is replaces by sunshine. Its a catchy album title as it builds off of the whole 'pocket full of sunshine' and 'pot full of gold' thus making it memorable and somewhat catchy. 


I don't think I had thought through the whole pot drawing thing, so I just experimented with various techniques and ways to try and make it looks decent! 

The programme Pixelmator which I have been using for the drawing of the pot, it contains some of the basic tools that photoshop has.

Luckily I had a pretty clear idea of how I wanted the pot to look, but on some of my attempts it just didn't look right.. 

By using the selection fool and overlapping different shapes / cutting away different shapes I got a pot shape I was happy with, then I created my own gradient using light and dark browns to attempt to make a 3D looking pot.
I zoomed out of this picture after creating the pot to discover it was actually soo teeny tiny, I was kicking myself for not thinking about how small that edge of the rainbow really was! 


I redid the pot in the same position but made it about three times the size of the first one, I used the same tools until I had a larger version of the same kind of pot drawn out

I then filled the middle of the pot yellow and created a gradient that was spherical with sunny colours and varieties of intensity which I played around with for a while but couldn't find a place I really thought it looked good in, when I zoomed out I wasn't too happy with the result, it just didn't look right and I realised this was because of the weird angle of the pot and the too perfect circular glow all around it. 

Soo, I redid the pot (in the same way again yes), but I had it on it's side facing to the right, it looked far better this way already, I then experimented with various 'smoke' effect brushes to create a glowy look around the pot, on photoshop at college I will add some white glowing tints as well to create a more sun-like effect, 

A pot full of sunshine.

Manipulating the inside image

I manipulated this image in much the same way I did with the first photograph of Aykut used on the front of the album.
Using the spot healing brush:

Before

After

Before 

After

On the teeth I also used the sponge tool to desaturate and dodge to brighten!
I used the dodge tool to brighten Aykut's eyes as well

Aykut's eye post brightening

Posters!

 

Monsters of folk poster

I love this poster as its got some really nifty use of the flower petal as an acoustic guitar pic, I like the way that although in the folk genre they have kept the poster fairly minimalist, with three colours that compliment each other and a lack of clutter in their poster is great inspirationally. The poster is so minimalist and I think we really need a bit more colour and stuff going on for Tumbleweed as we are more colourful, jazzy, excitable ect ! 

Lisa Mitchell's tour poster

Wow this is great and completely sticks to the conventions (quite a few fonts but the way they're positioned and gradually decrease in size and are made to be a little less bold in colour really works) the use of art and photography combined here is great and goes alongside all previous research in to folk artists, the websites and venders are listed at the bottom, as well as a teeny tiny picture of the album, however I am using the same image from my album on my poster but it is good to see that a clear link is vital to make each of the products fulfil their purposes.