Evaluation

The cover itself is a bit hit and miss. I really liked the cover in terms of layout but the focal point, the image of Kat, still needs so much work. The glasses look wonky, there's clipping issues where bits of hair are still showing through or bleeding over - I had this blown up on my 1920x1200 monitor and still didn't notice any of this stuff until I went to ripo graphics. The fonts I've chose I'm really pleased with and I feel colour-wise I have corrected the colossal mess I made when I first inked the piece on paper; the colours are now a lot more complementary.

I ended up having a lot more fun creating the spread as it wasn't as serious and I could throw some randomness in there like the picture of myself doing the daft pose. I'm still uncertain which was the best image to use of the right page (Pred or Winter Games) as they both looked kind of smart.

In retrospect, looking back over the course of the project time management was a huge issue for me. I kept getting stuck trying to figure out quick ways to do minor things and in most instances these were dead ends. I did feel I learnt a lot however when it came to retouching images and in this area I think my skills have increased, but it kind of opened my eyes as to how little I know digitally.

Spread Breakdown

This ended up being a little more straightforward than I thought as I kind of went with a digital feel similar to that of a tech mag to showcase the artwork.  

I ended up using Photoshop large for my 'lifting the lid' header and again wanted to keep the text brief as most of the spreads I looked at were more introductory than text heavy; plus it's supposed to be showcasing artwork so I kinda feel that should take up more page space.

The Predator image was tweaked a fair bit with the levels being changed, the colour inverted, and then the cutout filter being used to soften the image. It was already quite detailed so I tried not to go too crazy removing the cooler looking features.

The photo of myself was taken with my cousins trillion pound camera so perhaps that why the quality is so good. We messed about with me pulling increasingly daft faces until we found one where I looked my most tossy/David Blaine-like.

I think this worked a little better as there's more going on and it looks 'cleaner'. I added a little yellow rectangle to the bottom right to tie the winter games background in and I think this might things come together a bit better.

I think overall, I am more pleased with the second but honestly quite happy using either. They're both very basic but I ended up enjoying this process more than the actual front cover as that was more trail and error.

The Spread Theme and Images

So, my theme is current and past artwork and I'll be doing a little bio type introduction of myself - oh dear, we'll see how that goes!

I'm going to have a brief look at the inspiration for my spread and some old portfolio pieces I will consider using. 

Couldn't get a proper image of this but I absolutely loved the simplicity of this spread in one of Hazzels presentations. I instantly knew I wanted to emulate this type of look for my own spread but didn't want mine to be as photography heavy. 

At the start of  the year I spent a lot of time retouching old work with the dodge tool to put my blog. This has now become quite an advantage as I can quickly swap and change to find the best fit. 

The above is perhaps my most detailed piece (even though I totally ran out of steam for the background) definite candidate to take up a full page.

I think this print could be another great candidate. I was slightly disappointed early in the year when nobody seemed to give a (care in the world) about this as I was quite pleased with the result. 

God knows how old this is now but it's still my favourite piece from my portfolio. I think in the summer I'll sort out all the poor scalpeling for the type and put a proper font in there.

I've hammered this drawing to death throughout the course. Basically, I'll use it if everything is starting to look a bit barren and/or I need more black and white imagery. 

Adding Text

Final Stage

This took literally quarter of time it took me to retouch Kats drawing - I wasted so much time doing that, but I guess it was a good learning experience. 

I knew exactly where I was going here so I first broke the image down into layer, dividing the two colours - yellow and blue. I inverted the yellow, sampled the blue, then created a strip of blue to contain the first part of the title.

TITLE


I'd settled on the title a while back so this was quite straight forward.  I visited the mecca of experimental free fonts (dafont) and had a browse. I settled on the techno font 'Digital Anarchy' which looks fantastic imo. It's a serif style and all upper case and bold - which I feel complements what I have already put together well and works well with the black of the drop shadow and lips.

BARCODE


This was scanned in and used from one of my books  'A brief History of Time'. It sits on my shelf having barely been read so I thought it could be of some use finally.


ISSUE NUMBER

I used the font Handwriting Draft for the number which is such a funky font I felt I needed to fit it in somewhere. For the issue text I used 'gulim' which is nice and plain.

HEADLINE

Now, I kind of wanted to keep the text as brief as possible (as per the Dazed and Confused covers) so I thought something simple about Kats work would be a nice inviting statement. I tried to get a similar font to the one used in the Blur cover and the closet I could find with a pixelated look was Photoshop large. I did add a drop shadow here but it looked daft (like too much going on) so I kept the text plain.

The other two fonts used are Gulim again and Gulim in italic.

Now, onto the spread!

Practise Spread

This will be my last dry run before I try to create the cover proper. We've been introduced to industry terminolgy such as loren ipsum (which is a form of placeholder text) and

Now, be prepared, I've used graphic imagery to bring together the theme of my spread which will be eligible bachelours (my reasoning is quite simple; I love the gall of the characters in the photos) but have blurred the image as to not distress.

This gentleman will be take up a whole page but I plan on using the various filters to make him look less appauling - in this case I think something simple like cutout will suffice.

*starting to wish I hadn't picked these images*

I reckon changing the picture simply to black and white will work fine for this image. I still don't understand why you'd want a picture in your living room of yourself wearing a monocle and brandishing a pack of cards, but anyway, he looks happy.

I used the loren ipsum placeholder text to fill where the text, title and subheading and blurred and then used the cutout filter for both images to make them look, well, a little more classy.

Despite the daft content I'm actually really pleased with how this looks. The blue colour scheme linking the subheading and starting letter look nice and the the cutout filter masks a lot of the oddballness of the fellow on the left - even with that giant crucifix he kind of blends into the background.

The Front Cover Proper PII

So here is what the last page of tweaks looked like when they are all put together. Really liking the drop shadow and think the hat looks great imo. 

I've added a yellow background to kind of tie the image together with the glasses, and used the lasso to group and clean the image up - tis quicker than using the rubber tool.

Here is my second final-ish piece. I used the cutout filter in the end for the red hair and I think it looks ok. Not amazing by any means but it works. 

Once I got to this stage I got a few different opinions from Nat, Chris, Kat and Amy regarding which was better as a potential final piece. The red one seemed to be the favourite so I decided to build around that - it's only a quick change to swap out the red for black hair anyway if my opinion changes.

The front cover proper

To begin I scanned the A3 drawing in; this had to be done in two parts then both sides stitched together in Photoshop. 

My first port of call after making a few layer copies was to cut the background away (below) - miles better!

After this I started cutting out various areas such as the hair, glasses and hat with the lasso tool and putting them on their own separate layers. This took ages but once they were all separated I could begin to experiment.

My first aim was the hair. I tried all sorts of things (burn and dodge tool, various filters etc...) to fill the paper areas that I hadn't inked, but with zero success. I eventually found out the quick selection tool was my best bet here but there were so many patterns to fill I basically gave up.

I jumped from the hair (where I was getting no luck) to the hat and used the quick selection tool to change and fill the basic hat pattern.  Pleased with this I was content with it being a lock - I like the colour, it looks cool close up,  job done for the hat. 

I was constantly messing around with the glasses on and off - I was never happy with them. Here I think I used the dry brush tool which looked terrible. I then took a step back and used the quick selection tool to fill the glasses in solid colour, and started (bottom left) to do the same for the patterned coat. 

Back to the hair again (yes, there was absolutely no symmetry to this process!) and I've used the dry brush tool for the hair. Now, I never went back to this again but kind of kept it on the back burner as like 'a last resort' if I buggered the hair up.

Also notice I have started to make the lines constructing the nose and chin more prominent as they were kind of weak in the initial scan. 

This is as good as I could get the glasses.; quick selection was used to fill the colours and I used the expand tool to make the yellow cover the odd bit of black and give the glasses a more rounded look.

I added a massive drop shadow (well, it was a cheap way by filling the silhouette of Kat in black) and increased the size so it was a bit pop arty. 

The minor tweaks

+ increased the lip size

+ increased thickness of black lines

+removed the checkered shirt;

Creating Repeat Patterns

Now, I kind of wish I'd have known about this last year or had the ability to do it as I created repeat patterns by hand - which took an absolute age!

The basis for the pattern will be Kitty - as seen below:

The size of the image is 600x600 pixels.

I added a guideline to break the image up into four sections. With the guide lines in place both horizontially and vertically I can now paste the image of the kitty into the centre of the page.

Using the guidelines I have then broken Kitty up into four segments and placed the head at the bottom (going right to left) and the body at the top (right to left again).

Here's the easier part! I created an a4 document and then went to edit>fill and chose the pattern I had created.

Success!

I experminted further with my own images (one of a skateboarder) and everything went right first time. :)

Very pleased with this as it's going to save me loads of time in the future.

Magazine Covers I'd like to emulate

Recently we were given a plethora of magazine examples to look at by Hazzel which are associated with our chosen theme. My favourite from the collection which consisted of Q, V.S., MEAN and Vogue were the Dazed and Confused cover designs.

Text wise they weren't particularly heavy and it looks like the designers here have a lot of freedom when creating a cover; the covers I saw were all vastly different.

I like the simple nature of these covers. They're so stylish with a different tweak of artistic flair for each issue. This particular one with Alicia Keys in silhouette is a favourite of mine.



Given my chosen picture of Kat I think the style above for the blur cover is exactly what I'm after. It allows me to make Kat the focal point of my cover while making a brief explaination of what the magazine will consist of.

Spot on. :)

This has also reminded me to add a barcode!


Theme

So I have decided to theme my cover and spread around artwork I have produced over the period of the course.

I already know exactly what image I will use for my cover. I tried to create a homage to illustrator Nikki Farquharsson using Kat from fashion as my model. 

The design above involved creating various patterns for Kats hair, clothes and hat and filling them in using coloured fine liner. The result was awful. Total colour overload. The background (which I created and have literally tried to shoehorn into all my projects ith no success) looks god awful - will I ever find a successful use for this pattern!?

*moan over*

Anyway, my idea is to fill in all the areas of the pattern with block colour as the inked version has many, many marks where I didn't fill the area properly with ink. I also want to remove the background and replace it with something (anything) else; still haven't decided yet.

I see a lot of potential in this piece so we'll see how it works out.

Possible Title Names

So, in typical fashion I've put almost zero thought into this and will simply relay on my vast, vast knowledge of popular culture - i.e. crap comedies and medicore video games.

In short, and keeping with the Trailer Park Boys theme of my main blog, I've settled quite early on with the magazine title 'Bobandy'.

Reference:

Randy is in the series Trailer Park Boys and is often depicted with stylish marker pen hair.

It'll be an ironic name that sod all people will understand but I guess that's in keeping with many of these oddball magazine titles.

The spread itself I'm still unsure of but it will revolve around past artwork so possibly an interview of sorts or some kind of biography.