Photoshop Design Process

Not knowing how to start the construction of an album cover, I decided to use a random word generator as a source of inspiration. The first word I received was "convulsion" and decided to progress forward with this. Deciding to use Convulsion as the title of the album in question, I then quickly came up with the name of an artist, quickly associating the word convulsion with dark themes and thus creating the name 'Moriticia' based off of the Addams Family character. From here, I decided to build the album cover around this artist and the supposed dark theme of the album.

Using the same artist as when constructing a practice website, I made an edit of singer Lana Del Rey as my visual starting point. She would serve to be Moritica. To immediately incorporate the idea of a dark music style, I imported a black background on a new layer and there, to make it more interesting, blended multiple shades of grey using numerous brush styles.

After finding a background I was happy with, I decided to duplicate my edit of 'Morticia' onto three separate layers and there spread them out so that they were alongside each other and all visible upon the album cover. To further this dark theme whilst still retaining the importance of the artists' image, I changed the saturation and colour settings so that one of the duplicated pictures was in a thick, black and white design. With the other duplicated picture, I did a similar edit but further changed the lighting and colouring so that it was even darker.

From there, I swapped round some of the layers so that both duplicated faces became shrouded by a grey sort of mist (thus denoting that these 'evil' figures were a dark influence to the artist) and changed their positioning, so that the three faces were now diagonal to one another.

Finally, I worked on incorporating text onto the album cover. Firstly, I wrote out the name of the artist, Morticia, positioning it at the top of the cover, and then added the album's title, 'Convulsion', in the same font to conform to the same visual style of the piece but in a slighter smaller size, placing this at the bottom of the cover. To spice up the image slightly, I then added gradient underlines for each word.

Thus resulted the final draft of the album cover:

Whilst I am pleased with the outcome of my album cover, when it comes to creating the actual CD Digipak for my A2 Media Coursework Portfolio I would like to create something less reliant on photoshop and more reliant on photographs. With that said, I would say that this album cover successfully portrays the general feel and music style of the album and is successfully intriguing enough to capture an audience's interest.