Read on Twitter
I was discouraged from high school art when I was 13, because I couldn't, and still can't draw, I don't enjoy it, I don't have a good eye for art.
But if I can make decent covers for albums, anyone can with a bit of practice https://twitter.com/Mike1inFive/status/1253023548723073024
But if I can make decent covers for albums, anyone can with a bit of practice https://twitter.com/Mike1inFive/status/1253023548723073024
Lets look at what I did to make the last Ghost Signs' cover. It was done with Pixelmator, but I'm sure any photo editor can be used, like gimp or something.
It was inspired by this photo by @oscillik
https://vsco.co/oscillik/media/54bdca9ae75515254e8b4574
It appealed to my taste, reminded me of one of the photos from the cover of F#A#∞. Obviously, the finished thing doesn't look like the inspiration.
https://vsco.co/oscillik/media/54bdca9ae75515254e8b4574
It appealed to my taste, reminded me of one of the photos from the cover of F#A#∞. Obviously, the finished thing doesn't look like the inspiration.
I figured I couldn't license the original, so I looked on Pexels for something else that I felt had a similar desolate vibe. After looking at a lot of photos of skyscrapers I can to this photo: https://www.pexels.com/photo/blue-high-rise-building-2590716/
There was something unique about it (Pexels has a lot of skyscraper photos that look the same...) but it doesn't have the isolation feel that @oscillik's photo had. In the image on pexels it's clear that the construction site is on the edge of a city.
So I deleted the background buildings. The sky is fairly "simple" so I tried clone filling it and blurring it, but it lost the small definition it had. Back to pexels and took https://www.pexels.com/photo/architecture-blue-sky-building-business-335685/, another photo I'd seen previously but rejected for the building being too busy
But the cloud formations are interesting. So I deleted the sky in the construction image, and cut out a chunk of the sky from the corner of the second image, and just slotted it in behind the two towers and grayscaled everything with some tweaked brightness/contrast
The image is from a crisp DSLR, and my tastes lean more to old film photos. I find adding a very small Gaussian blur (like <=1px), adding fine noise to simulate film grain, a bit of a vignette. They Pixelmator has a vintage filter that tweaks the colours/adds more noise.
And that was the final image. The Obi strip was created by finding a fancy calligraphy font. The small letters sucked in it though, so the small letters are actually capital letters at a smaller size.
Once the strip was done, I cut the background, the secret is that there is no image behind the strip.if you remove it, the two bits of the image would more or less go back together.
But that's all it is. Knowing what you like, looking at photos and images that you like, and knowing what you can do with a photo editor.
Decent cover images don't need to be hard.
Decent cover images don't need to be hard.
Other things. I have a weird thing where I can’t visualise colour in my head. I see colour but if you say ‘imagine this room but in pink’ I can’t do it (I also only see dreams in black and white)
But it makes it hard for me to get colours that match well together
But it makes it hard for me to get colours that match well together
So I cheat. I find pictures I like the colour scheme of and generate palettes from those. I did a load of @Transpacifika art that I googled 1970s colour scheme and just used those. Also some websites that you take one colour you like and it gives you 4 more that work
