This is a peice we did where we created a dark abstract backdrop and then picked an issue to create a magazine spread. The issue i chose was china's occupation of tibet. I first learned about this when we studied the book sky burial in year 12. As part of that study we watched 7 years in tibet which shows china's invasion of tibet. I feel strongly that Tibet should be freed and left to live the life they choose.

My childrens story book

The characters i came up with when asked to were Super Goober, Pupil Pete, Sticky Steve and Barry Bacteria. There's a fifth character norm but he's not in the paintings. The basis behind my painting is that Barry bacteria is an evil peice of Bacteria who wants to rule Goobsville. He uses vicious diseases as weapons. The aim for Super Goober and the gang is to thwart Barry's evil plans and save Goobsville. In this particular part of the story Barry is planning to unleash a tub of Flu contaminated snot onto Goobsville in order to control them since they will be to sick to defend themselves. But never fear Super Goober is right around the corner ready to Stop barry and once again save the day.

Song 8

The feeling and colours i got from this song were a swirl of bright, happy, feel good colours with a country feel about them. green for grass, blue for the sky and red because i just felt like sticking it there.

Song 7

This song, especially the guitar gave me a gentle breezy felling. so I drew light blue and yellow squiggles to represent the breeze. The pink and red spots represent the nature feeling so they to me are like pretty flowers.

Song 6

This song gave me a sense of yearning, like love surrounded by mess and chaos. I saw the red as it's the colour of love and surrounded it with a mess of brown as this is the colour of dirt. i did this to symbolise messy love.

Song 5

This song to me sounds like nails on a chalk board! which is why i saw black with white streaks down it, just couldn't get past the nails down the chalk board.

Song 4

The thought that sprung(pardon the pun) to mind was that of spring time. bright spring like colours such as green, blue and yellow were what i saw, since i got the sense of spring all happy and nice.

Song 3

This song envoked dark washed out colours placed in a way that was just all over the place, a big washed out dark smother.

Song 2

When the song started it was loud and dominating which made me think of loud dominating colours such as blue, red and bright pink. The song then softened which made me think of softer colours and then boomed again at the end which gave me the whole bright and bold to soft back to bright and bold pattern.

Synaesthesia

The following 8 images were painted in accordance to listening to a peice of music and painting the coloursand images we got from that peice of music.

Song 1

When i heard the song the thing that popped into my head was the blue sky and the clouds. I must admit that i used yellow because the song was the simpsons so it made me think of them and they are yellow.

rough sketch number 4

rough sketch number 3

this is another of my rough sketches

This is one of my rough sketches page for my designing of the booklet

This is the back inlay of my Cd assessment

This is the completed and printed cd face from the assessment

This is an image of my finished and printed front cover of my Cd booklet.

The design Process for my CD booklet
The first thing that I did to begin the process was to research music genres, even though I had already pretty much settled on what my booklet was going to be about. Doing this showed me what other options I had and the possibilities I had to choose from should I change my mind and decide not to create a cd based on my self. Once I had settled on my idea and chosen my lyrics I began to design. Throughout the process I made many changes and even completely changed the whole design. My initial idea was for the album title to be break free. The design I chose was a beach theme including myself standing on the beach with my arms outstretched in a manner that suggests I was “breaking free”.
After playing around with this idea for a little while I came up with a new concept, mostly because I wanted the booklet to contain mostly my own images and there was no beach near by. I changed the album title to look deeper, another track on the album and the cover design to a pair of eyes. The inside of the booklet consisted of images that I had taken. I then began to sketch ideas down as to how I wanted it to look and be set out. I sat down and looked at the lyrics and thought of which images would go best with them. I drew up in my diary rough ideas of the images and which lyrics they would go with. Once I had settled on the images I got my camera and began to take the pictures.
The first image I took was my eyes to be used for both the cover and the track look deeper. It took several attempts to get this picture right especially since I have difficulty keeping my eyes open in pictures! I then took the images to be used for the remaining 9 tracks which were, a leafless tree, a close up of a flower, a angel ornament, clouds, ears, a pill bottle surrounded by pills( in this case multi vitamins), a teddy bear ornament and a music box. The image I used for break free was one I took for my photography assignment which I really liked and thought it would look great as the back drop. The photographs I took of the ears I then took into photo shop used the pen tool to cut them out and made a composite of ears as the background for the track “deaf ears”.
The cover which included the eyes I felt was a little bare looking and when I got Luke’s opinion he to said it looked under designed which prompted me to make some changes. The new design I came up with consisted of a river and the reflection of the eyes in the river surrounded by plants and flowers. The cover I finished with I came across by accident. I knew we were allowed to use stock exchange images so I decided to look for a river on the site. While looking for the river is when I stumbled upon the beautiful image of the cascading waterfall. The moment I saw it I knew it would make an excellent cover so I changed my search to look for waterfalls to find one for the back inlay to match the front. Once I had found the three images I wanted from the stock exchange website I saved them to my hard drive and inserted them in photo shop. All the images in my booklet I desaturated to give them a black and white semi washed out appearance as I felt this suited my type of music which is alternative folk like.
I opened up a document sized 12.8cm by 12.8cm which is the measurement I got from one of my cd cases plus the 3mm bleed. I created the grids and inserted the pictures then as mentioned above desaturated the images. The initial type face I had selected was brush script STD but on advice from Luke decided to change it. The new type face I chose was Arial black, but again advice from look that the font was to bold and over shadowed the text I eventually settled on Arno pro. The font size I settled on was 8pt. In order to make the text better seen on the black and white backgrounds I created a feathered box filled it white and changed the opacity so it was just a faded white box beneath the text. The design I chose for the lyrics was to align all of them to the right side and the song title up the top on the left. Doing this not only looked good but also allowed me more room for my lyrics.
The design I chose for the track titles was informal Roman as the font sized 30 with drop shadow and outer glow which made the text stand out more from the background which in turn made it easier to see. I used the same font and blending options for the track listing, however I made the track listing green and of course a smaller size. I also created my own barcode for the back in photo shop which I feel was a better option than simply getting one from the net and pasting it on. As a back cover for the booklet I decided to create an about me section in which I gave a brief blurb on myself and of course it wouldn’t be an album without the thank you section.
As for the disk face the design I came up with was I selected another photo I had taken for photography which is a watery leafy, which I felt sat nicely with the water theme that I had going. Like all my other images I desaturated it and added my name and album title on either side of the hole in the middle. I used a similar type face to the front cover yet different because although I needed and wanted consistency, I also want some slight diversity and I feel that the two type faces go well together and compliment each other nicely. For the front cover I chose a curly like font and set it out so that my name was about two or three pts bigger than the album title.
In evaluation I feel that the overall outcome is pleasing and achieves the purpose of expressing my self and my music quite well. I did run into several problems and had made some bad choices for the design especially with the type face, but as I am learning I asked Luke for help and advice and feel that the tips and suggestions he made greatly improved those bad decisions and made the project more appealing to the eye and easier to read in some cases. I’m quite pleased with the result and how much effort I put into both creating and improving the overall design. Although probably far from perfect the end result in my opinion is pretty good especially considering this is my first attempt at this sort of stuff and I am relatively new to photo shop and using a digital camera! I know I will only improve as I go but I feel this is a pretty good effort.

How I came up with my Idea for my CD booklet
When we were told that we were going to be creating a CD booklet based on a fictional, made up band I instantly decided to do my self. Music is a big love of mine and something I have been involved with since I was young. Being a musician and already having a bunch of lyrics I felt that it would be in my benefit to do my self as already having the lyrics would allow me more time to work on the design and production of the booklet. Having been writing lyrics since I was 11 years old I had a fairly decent sized collection to choose from. Although some may see this as being an easy option as I already had the lyrics, I disagree as I did at one stage have to write them so therefore would put in just as much effort it’s just spread over a longer amount of time. Also as I am an aspiring musician and would one day like to release a CD I thought that this was the perfect chance to design and create my own booklet.
I did however research different styles and ideas to see what else was out there. I went on the internet and looked up the different genres and selected 5 to come up with an idea for and toy around with a little bit. The five genres I selected were country, death metal, pop, rap and reggae. For each genre I came up with an artist or band name, an album title and a rough design for the cover. For the country genre my idea was to do a band called the Buckaroos with the album title being time. The rough design I came up with for that was an image of a big clock as the cover. For death metal my band name was death maggot with a not so thought out title of bring your own brick. The image I had in mind for this was a dead maggot in a pool of blood.
Since that idea was clearly, well crap I came up with one for Reggae. The artist I came up with for this was Jeff Turner and the album title being chill out. The idea for the cover was to have someone meditating as reggae has a smooth peaceful feel about it. For pop I choose a teeny-bopper name Randy-lee Murphy and a typical style pop title sweet kisses with the cover of course being a close up of Randy’s head. With Rap I came up with the name Lickwid for the artist and gets me some for the title as this was the sort of titles I came across in my research. The cover design for Rap was to have a Rapper in particular an African America Rapper standing up against a brick wall looking cool and indifferent.
Obviously none of those ideas had a lot of merit and I feel this is because I couldn’t get past in my mind, although I was trying to the idea of creating a cd booklet on my self. I often find that the case once I get an idea it’s hard to change my mind especially when it’s something I am so passionate about like music. Throughout my research I came across many interesting genres that I had never really heard of before which would have been interesting to do but I couldn’t seem to shake my initial idea. After doing this I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t go past my initial idea of doing my self. Since I had now chosen what my idea was I then sat down and sorted through my lyrics to pick which one’s I thought were the best. Once I had selected the 10 songs I wanted to include in my booklet I sat down and began designing.