Construction of digi-pack: front cover

Front cover - Photo

To begin creating the white and black sketch drawing/cartoon like effect, I searched on YouTube for tutorials showing me how as I am new to Photoshop. In doing this, I found this tutorial:

This tutorial was really helpful as it taught me how to get this appearance and talked through every step. First I converted my image to black and white, I then clicked on Image then Image adjustments where I was able to find the different tools I needed to create the appearance. I first adjusted the levels to exaggerate the highlights and shadows of the picture, I decided to do this before the threshold as although the tutorial did it the other way around I found that some of his features were getting lost in the process as they were too light so doing it the other way around counteracted this. After adjusting the threshold to what I wanted it to look like I clicked on the curves option and adjusting the tool to create an S shape as this is what was done in the tutorial, this didn't make a significant difference but it didn't make the image look bad so I left it. After I decided to blur the image through selecting filter bar and then blur which lead to gaussian blur, and I put this to 1% to soften the edges as advised in the tutorial.Which left me with the image I desired. 

Steps 

Creating the background

To create the rustic appearing background like the poster background for Trainspotting, I figured the easiest way to create this was to use the clone stamp tool in Photoshop. This was quite tedious however I am very happy with how it turned out. To do this I uploaded the Trainspotting poster into Photoshop and used the clone stamp tool to remove everything apart from the background. I then used the clone stamp tool starting at the top right corner and then moving onto the document where I was making the background and started transitioning the clone stamp onto my image. I then did the same thing to emulate the texture of the circle in the middle and the shade. I decided the quickest way to do this was to (on the original image) clone stamp out everything other than the background of the circle and then re-clone stamp it and transition it onto my document.

The next step was fitting the image of David inside the circle. To do this I placed the image where I wanted him to be and all of the excess I removed through using the pen tool, this was useful as it left a smooth finish rather than using the polygon tool which can leave an unprofessional appearance.


After this, I began shading in David's face using the clone stamp tool once again to get the cream textured rustic appearance like in the Trainspotting poster. I then merged all of the contents of the circle together so that I could adjust the size to prevent having to redo certain steps. 

                    Typography

The next job was adding in the font, for my front cover I wanted a more minimalist appearance so I decided that I didn't want to crowd it with too many words. I decided to name the album renegades because I think the word will have a personal attachment to people in the target audience as the definition of renegades is 'a person who deserts and betrays an organisation, country, or set of principals'. Although this verb has negative connotations or traitor-ship and desertion, I believe that it will wring true for the target audience as one of the characteristics and ideologies of the rock genre is being anti-establishment and rebellious which is basically what the term means. On top of this, another reason for naming the track renegades is because the track I used for my music video is this song and therefore the name connects the two together. 

The font I chose for the title is called Porter, I downloaded it from Dafont into Photoshop as I think the appearance and typography looks more professional and suits the style more than any of the other fonts in Photoshop. For the colour of the font, I took inspiration once again from the Trainspotting poster as one of the words in the poster is black and the one beneath is the cream shade that is used in the circle so I thought that replicating this would tie the two nicely together.