MY FRONT COVERDIGIPAK

WHERE I GOT THE IDEAS FROMSince I do quite like War of the Worlds, the films, book and Jeff Wayne’s musical composition, I’d thought about a picture I saw on the theme with a hand on the Earth looking rather menacing. I wanted to interpret that idea for my own, and make my very own hand on the Earth. As you can see from the photo that it’s quite Alien looking, so I’d have to do the best with a human hand, but from what I did, I think I did a good job. For the smoky effect on the hand, Earth, and text, upon browsing various YouTube videos on how to learn Photoshop I came across this video that showed me how to add smoke to my images, like the image is disintegrating. I quite liked this idea of the hand sucking the life from Earth.

MY IDEAFrom my mock-up drawing, I thought that instead of struggling on how to make a hand look alienated, I just thought that I could add a red-ish tint to the hand to give the Martian look to it. So I’d have a hand placed over the Earth, and the smoky effect that I’ve picked up will make it look like they’re both disintegrating into space. From the photo on the left, you can see my type of plan that I was going for, the blue and beige mist would be the smoky effect I’d add to it.

PHOTOSHOPBefore this course, I’ve never really had an excuse to use Photoshop. So it did take some time to get used to, but thanks to various YouTube videos, they soon got me on track on how to work the basics of the software.

MORE ON PHOTOSHOPFrom the tutorial of the girl on fire, I learned how to put fire on items and even managed to re-create the girl on fire. It also got me thinking about whether or not fire would be a good idea for my front cover, needless to say, I got working on the idea. During the girl tutorial, where I put fire on someone, I used images such as these:

IN THE END, I GOT THIS:

FOR MY DIGIPAK (1ST DRAFT)As you can see, it didn’t work out so well. The front cover looked too fake, and people said to lower the hand more, and blend it in with the Earth. One person also said that it looks like the hand is coming out of the ocean, rather than towering over the Earth in a menacing way. So instead of making changes to this, I went back to my original plan.

MY ORIGINAL IDEA

As you can see from the two previous photos, my original plan was to make the hand look alienated, so instead of changing the colour of the hand, I changed the look and angle of the fingers to give it a more obscure look. So over the time I managed to changed the look of the hand, and make it look as though it was smoking away from the earth. I used the brush tool that gave the look of smoke, and with the hand in an awkward position situated over the world, I added the smoke look to them both. So overall, I added a moon onto the background of my image, and added more space for which the text would situate.

After I had created the background, it was time for me to add the picture of the hand that I had taken, and add it to the Earth. I also added some nails to the hand to give it a more alienated look. But I wasn’t done there, I planned on adding a smoke look to it, as said before. So as you can see, I blended the hand in using the smoke and various tools on PhotoShop. After playing around for a while, I added the text to the cover and the result was: