Album Cover Preliminary

For this project I decided to recreate the cover of a Doors album. I found the original from a Google search of album covers and thought it would be interesting to add a wood grain effect that I learned how to do from this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfmj4xunvBk after that the doorway was made with the rectangle tool and the light shine was made with the pen tool. The figure was made up of rounded rectangles and a circle for the head all merged together to made it one object. I'm not complete yet but this is my progress so far.  

Original 

Sorry class I am a bit late uploading any progress but for the past week I have been seriously ill with temperatures of 104 and strep throat. I have been working on this design here and there when I was able to and I'm happy with the results. My process and tools used are below, comments and suggestions are welcome.

I first started out by taking a photo of a sneaker which I then uploaded to PS to remove the background using the quick selection tool>selected the inverse>erased the background.

Next the new shoe was opened in AI where I used several ellipses to create the general shapes of the different panels of the shoe. All the ellipse that made up a certain area were then merged and colored to form one shape then the warp and pucker tool were used to get the final edges cleaned up and straight.

Setting certain layers above and below others meant that my lines did not have to be perfect since the above layer was going to cover the ones below.

Each shape then had its stroke applied to outline the edges and at this point I was done with the shoe in AI but to give it more dimension and texture I took it back into PS.

With the shoe back in PS I added effects such as inner shadow, bevel, emboss, and texture. Each panel of the shoe had these effects altered differently to give them the look of different types of material. For example the sole of the shoe looks more rough and grainy than the smooth toe section, the padding where your foot enters appears to be made of cushion or soft material and the shoe lace eyelets and check mark look as if they are made of a reflective metal.

To finish this off I made a copy of the base layer and placed it below all the others, then used the gradient tool and played around with a color and direction of the fade until I found something that showed off the final shoe well.  

Artist Statement

My back ground in art started at a young age mainly inspired and supported by my uncle Ed who was an artist/musician. He always encouraged me to draw, paint, and trace, anything that involved the use of my hands to create, this lead to a few local art shows but nothing more and I soon lost interest for a while but as I grew older I would have cravings to create and it was in 2006 that I started to get back into art for pleasure. I would like to consider myself a jack of all trades but master of none when it comes to the different art mediums available today. I still enjoy a watercolor painting or pencil sketch but I like to branch out and explore many different types of ART or at least what I consider to be art. Some of the not so common forms I have experimented with are auto painting through use of a HVLP spray gun, airbrushing, pin stripping, powder coating and spray painting or (tagging) all of which I have enjoyed extensively. I soon realized that I would like to get back to the smaller projects ones that were not so time consuming so I jumped into art mediums that I had never used before such as oil & acrylic paints, charcoals, artists quality markers, pastels (soft & hard) and pastel pencils just to name a few. I have really taken a liking to the pastels and find that I currently reach for those more than any other medium. As you can see my art background is kind of all over the place but I like it like that, I feel I have a well-rounded knowledge of many art forms and techniques and have used those skills to build upon the next and the next.

However digital art is where I lack the skills and that is why I’m taking this course and ones like it in order to get a solid foundation of what these programs have to offer and to see if they can somehow benefit me. Having only worked with Photoshop CS5 for the first time last semester I did find it useful but more geared toward photo editing and enhancing a good tool to have in your tool box but not really my cup of tea. My expectations for Illustrator are higher having heard great things about it and what it has to offer and after watching the posted videos and many more on you-tube and the internet I’m excited to get started with this software and find ways to adapt it into my other interest.