Band Poster

For my poster i decided to do a gig line up/propaganda, as it is the most common type of band poster. Here is the first 'draft' of it. As you can see, it's just plain and boring, a typical poster from a group of lazy moody teenagers. It just tells you the info you need to know, but doesn't arrest the eye in any way really. However, i can use this a basis to create something much more interesting. Just F.Y.I, The bands are all made up names, designed to try and be as mock-emo as possible, and the World's End Pub is actually a real pub, I'm not sure if they do live  performances though or if it's even nice, i just like the name...

This is it jazzed up a little bit. The texts are bigger and more varied, but still not that arresting visually.

Ever so slightly more jazzed up, using the smudge and brush tool. I can't help but think the third band's name alteration is a little phallic....

This is a version with a B-movie style woman screaming. I used the burn tool to make it darker, so the text stands out more. I quite like it, but i think it's still missing something else.Also, the left arm is terrible. It's all mangled and looks like a huge bruise on her arm. Also worth a mention, i used my freind's band poster as inspiration for this.

As you can see, it was also done in photoshop, and has a similar lay out to mine, as in the descending order and different font for each band. However, i'm fairly sure this is pretty standard for most band posters.

 Here is a different take on it. Obviously it's much more vibrant and colourful, and it draws your eye straight away. It doesnt look quite as polished though. The font is pretty boring though. And the colours would probably stand out better with black outlines.

This is a different variant, where i tried to show off some 'skill'. Namely, as you can see, the background colours are the same as the font, so it changes to black. I just achieved that with paint brush and fill tools. I think it stands out slightly better than the previous one.

More band inspiration.

Seeing these images probably won't mean anything to you, but these are the bands that inspired the 'sound'.

And that particular sound is Post Hardcore, which is generally, in lay mans terms, lot's of screaming mixed with 'clean' vocals. It's not to everyone's tastes, no, but it's quite a popular sound in today's youth, and i like it at least.

Albums featured-Alexisonfire-Old Crows/Young Cardinals

Dividing The Line (EP)

We Are The Ocean-Cutting Our Teeth

Atreyu-Suicide Notes & Butterfly Kisses

A Day To Remember-Homesick

Similar bands.

Bands that helped inspire the theme and artwork i have produced.

They all have a similar dark vibe to them in my opinion, and while not completely similar to my first band art, there's still that vibe that's pretty similar. Maybe. Also,  I would just like to point out, that even though i implied they were all emo, they are all (except the last one) really good albums. And while they are all (mostly) good albums, they're not genre-relevent really. They are dark and emo, but i mean they're music isn't anything like what i imagined mine to be.

File Formats

GIF-Graphics interchangeable format. Used for animations, up to 8 bits per pixel. Limited colour palette, up to 256 colours. Also used for simpler images, but due to the limited colour it's remarked as unsuitable for reproducing colour photographs.

JPEG-Joint Photographic Experts Group. Commonly used for photographs. It is also a common method of Lossy compression, which means it has to lose some of it's data in order to reach it's goal.

BMP-Bitmap Formatted Image. An image file used to store bitmap digital images. Most BMP images generally have a large file size due to lack of any automatic compression, but using the Lossless method they can be considerably compressed, due to the fact there is so much redundant data in the image.

PNG-Portable Network Graphic. A bitmapped file format that employs lossless data compression. It was initially created to improve and replace the GIF format, and designed for web based sharing, not for printing.

TIFF-Tagged Image File Format. A file format for storing images, mostly popular around apple mac owners, photographers and graphic artists.

PostSecret Banner

This is my banner for Postsecret. It's taken me literally weeks to upload, so i just decided to re-save the file and now it's finally worked. What i basically did was copy the images straight from the site and paste them into photoshop (after re-sizing them). It started off with one layer per image but due to pacing issues it quickly increases to several per layer to make it more visually arresting. I then painted the whole thing black to make it look like it was fading. I then pasted the postsecret logo onto it, and reversed the layers, and with the eraser, it looks like it's fading away. I'm reasonably proud of this, but it looks quite choppy as it fades away.

Second album cover

This is the cover to my second album, Still Asking. However, it's pretty boring and not that inspiring and is a bit of a leap visually in comparison to my previous album, so i've decided it's just a preliminary image.

The original image.

My second attempt at my second album. It looks smoother (slightly) and i quite like it, but it seems just too plain, and not in conjunction with the previous album, although it still has that air of pretentious-ness and mock-emo that i was aiming for. I achieved this by taking the above image and duplicating it. I then flipped the copy so i was facing myself. I used the eraser to clear the background and then fill it gray. I then painted the speechbubbles and added the text. I used the hue and saturation tool to make the copy (left) completely black, but because the paint and speech bubbles were still on the same layer as the right one, i had to use the fill tool again, and thus ended up with the finished image. Also, when erasing the background, i used it also to alter the faces so it looked like two other people, rather than just myself.

Album Cover

I tried to make a tongue in cheek emo album cover, with a moody, pretentious look. I started out with this image i took of myself.

I then used Photoshop, with the text tool, and primarily the Burn and Dodge tools, which make the image darker or lighter. I also changed the Hue so it appeared more monochrome, and made my blue eyes and grey shirt green.

Overall, I'm really quite proud of this. I think it's suitably moody, and the eyes and t-shirt are really striking.

In this version, the darkness around the face is less patchy, and the t-shirt and background are lighter, and the eyes have been darkened. I really like the background, but i don't think it's quite as atmospheric as the former.

Here is my final concept. Using the burn tool, it is the darkest of them all, but still with the background that i like. In a way it almost looks quite cartoon-ish. But now I'm torn between this one and the first as I'm not sure which one i want to use, this or the first one. The first one seems too simple but this one seems more complex than what i was trying to achieve.

Here are some concept designs i quickly drew for the back cover.

But images of dictionarys are harder to find than what i first anticipated.

Here is my actual design. It's some badly photoshopped fire on a bunch of books. The background looks terrible though and will definatly need a re-do, and the fire needs to be blended in better, but i like the conecpt, as it links to the theme of lexical gaps quite well.