The process of construction

Through the process of construction, I experimented and developed upon my new skills of using the image-editing software of Photoshop in order to create some album artwork for a band. We used Dyer's star theory to come up with our idea as we wanted to create a star as an ideology through the use of the colours blue and purple and create the ideology that music is mysterious and up for interpretation just as spells and magic are and this is why we chose an ambiguous and abstract image to represent this ideology of the band we created.

We started off by brainstorming our ideas and coming up with a concept and idea on paper. We first used a random word generator to create an initial idea and from this we picked the word 'spell' which from this we developed further ideas and words including spellbound, magic, enchantment, powers, alchemy, lightning, fantasy and fortune telling. We followed this up by creating some sketches from these words of what visual ideas we had and we used google images to help us with this creative process.

After we came up with an idea we chose a picture from the internet of a hand with a purple ball of energy in its hand and we wanted to incorporate the colour blue into our album artwork so we decided to layer the blue orb on top of the purple orb.

We did this by creating a new layer for the blue orb and we then followed this up by using the magnetism lasso tool to draw around the outline of the blue orb and decide on desired area we wanted to cut out and then once we had used the lasso tool to select an area we copied this and pasted it onto the other layer in which we had the image of the hand with the purple orb.

We realised that the blue orb looks very fake and stood out from the original purple orb, therefore we decided to utilise the smudge tool to hide the sharp lines of the blue orb and mold together the two orbs of colour to create a crisper look and more professional appearance of the orbs. We did this by selecting the smudge tool and dragging the icon across the outline of the two orbs making them ultimately appear more abstract and ambiguous. Additionally, we also used the smudge tool to make the lines for the outline of the hand appear less harsh and defined and try and make it appear as though the hand was merging with the black background. We decided to do this to imitate the ideology of the band through the ideas of Dyer's star theory and create the impression that the thought behind the smudging of the hand was to represent the fact that they blend into the background and that what is important is the coloured orb which represents the soul of their music and take the focus and importance away from the hand which represented the band members. We developed this idea through the ideas of the star as an ideology through Dyer's star theory.

 

We then had to come up with an idea for the background. We went back to the brainstorm that we did on paper earlier and decided to use the idea of sparkles, stars and light and so we chose an image off google images of a black background with little coloured stars or sparkles of light. We then created a new layer with this image and in order to put this image behind the other image we had created previously we had to drag this layer underneath the other layer using the layer tools on the right hand side of the screen.

When manipulating the size of the images we had to bear in mind that an album artwork is only 12cm by 12cm and this includes around 300 pixels/inch. Therefore, we decided to create this template of a size before we did any of the stages mentioned above. Once we had created our images we took into account the rule of thirds and decided that because you are supposed to put the most important information or most striking image on the right hand side usually near the top that we put the text in the top left and then the hand with the orb in the bottom left as this would create the most impact for the audience.

When creating the text we used the text tool and we came up with the name 'Enchanted' for the title of the album from the brain storm that we did previously and we came up with the name 'The Horoscopes' for the band because this derived from the ideas of the stars and the darkness. After writing the text using the text tool we decided to change the font of the text into something more abstract and more understated and we chose to go with the colour blue to mirror the orb and also to stand out against the black and the colour blue also matched the star image of them being down to earth and chilled, therefore the symbolic convention behind the colour blue matches the star ideology of the band.

After this we decided to manipulate the spaces between the letters to make the text more legible and add to the ambiguous vibe that we gave the album artwork. We did this by selecting the text tool that looks like an A which then allowed us to change the space between the letters and we chose to make the spacing 75 as we believed that this would work harmoniously with the star ideology that the audience are distanced from the band and music through Dyer's paradox that the star is both present and absent. So the spacing of the letters of the album title mirror the fact that there is space between the band and the audience.

 

Overall, my product was constructed first through a brain storm of ideas from a random word generator search, then explored further using inspiration from google images and then I utilised the skills I had acquired from my Photoshop lessons in order to use the smudge tool, lasso tool and also the transform scale tool. I used a variety of tools and techniques from Photoshop in order to construct my product of an album artwork taking into account the ideas from Dyer's star theory.