Album Art

Original Image

Today I started working on the inside pages of my digipack starting with a picture of Katy pouring tea. I overlayed it onto a larger image in order to create space for lyrics, however I felt that the artist should not also be overlayed so I created a mask of the artist and the tea and overlayed the two photos not including the artist in a sepia tone. Then I felt that the artist should should stand out more from the filter so I made the mask of the artist remain in colour, I also tried to make the background a bit brighter as I felt the darkness of the picture did not fit the genre. I finally settled upon a faded brown colour for the background (to stick to the genre but to still portray the old looking style I wanted the photo to be in) I also feathered the mask in order to make it look a little more soft.

I then worked on the other pages, repeating the mask of the artist style to make her stand out from the overlayed background, I also increased the saturation of the photo to make the colours brighter and more vivid especially highlighting the eye shadow and the powder paint. I then just added the I Love It lyrics in a simple style just to get a feel for what it would look like (I will most likely change the lyrics on this page later).  

I then added the lyrics to the second page choosing a song that I felt would match the somewhat girl power feel we have given to the artist, continuing the same fonts from the first page.

Finally I worked on a double page increasing the saturation of the graffiti, the artists jeans, lip stick, coloured eyeliner and eyes. I then added two songs which again I felt suited our artists image. I tried to make the title How To Be A Heartbreaker look as though it was written on the poles and the lyrics following the lines of the poles. Similarly I tried to make Bad Girls look like it's written on the step and the lyrics look as though they were on the ground. I thought this would help to make the double page look more visually interesting to the audience. I would say I am most pleased with this page, however there are a few things I should go back and fix just to make it look a little better (e.g. 'how' is curved incorrectly).

Ideas for album art

Today I decided to start trying out ideas for the album cover. My initial ideas being a close up of the artists face, either eyes or mouth. The first one is just to get idea of the style and word placement, hence why it is a little dull. For the second image I then added some colour and lips, as a sort of logo. I thought this made it look a little more girly, however as our artist is meant to have a grunge style I thought this wasn't the right look for the artist

I then tried out something that I thought might look a little more edgy, using a 3D effect on a photo of lips. I thought this created more a feel of the style I want, however I felt it did not look professional enough or close enough to the style of pop album covers.

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Original image

So I then started to try overlaying photos as this is what is usually done to create a more professional look. I also added colour to the eye make-up to try to sync it to the idea of the glow scene in the music video, thereby making it more of a combined marketing campaign than just an album cover. I then played around with text glow, which I thought helped to make it link into the photo rather than just looking like added text.

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Finally I played around with the placement and boldness of the artist name a lot. the first change being from darker to a gradient. Then i moved the text to the upper left corner, and then split over the 'I LOVE IT!' title in the middle. Finally settling on both words together at the bottom.

Conventions of Digipacks

Digipacks or Album Art Consist of the front cover, back cover, spine, inside CD tray, CD and then some form of inside pages (be it a booklet or fold out).

Generally the front cover with feature the artist name and album title, self titled albums just have the artist name. The back cover then consist of the included songs and then the record company, copyright etc.

The inside pages are generally lyric pages (a picture with the lyrics from an included song) however occasionally they show a sort of photo album or collage of just images of the artist.

Each genre has elements to their digipacks which are specific to them, for example, pop artists usually feature a singular picture of the artist (most likely their face) as the cover where as rock bands will usually have some sort of design as their cover.