POST #17 - ANCILLARY TASK 2: ALBUM COVER

SEQUEL TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIME

So, we have another ancillary practice task. Hooray. Enthusiasm through the roof. This time, we had to recreate an album cover instead of a movie poster. I was paired up with Lily Ray, and we were given the album cover for David Bowie's "Aladdin Sane". An album title I don't think I'll ever understand.

Image result for aladdin sane

The theme of this one was makeup. All the album covers given out relied fairly heavily on makeup; on the face, on the hands, etc. Just a buncha makeup. We lucked out, getting an album cover that didn't require much makeup... but even so, Lily and I had no face paint of any kind between us to recreate the lightning bolt streaking down Bowie's face. So we went for the next best thing. 

We printed out the lightning bolt. And intended to stick it on the face of our model.

Speaking of the model, we chose Noah Yeates after some time trying to select someone. His features matched our criteria at the time;

  • Defined and prevalent jawline
  • Large hair that can be put up

So with the perfect model found, we started our brief photoshoot. We stuck the lightning bolt to his face, and took pictures from angles that we thought were close enough to the original.


The spitting image of Ziggy Stardust himself.

I brought the image into Photoshop, and started to edit it. This took much more editing time than the "her" poster did, despite the two being both as simplistic as each other. Even from the get-go, I had to prioritise certain elements of the editing. Specifically, making the lightning bolt look better. As in, making it look NOT like paper and more like makeup.

I took several steps into making the initial photo look like Bowie's album cover. In order, the steps I took were:
  1. Blur the lightning bolt into the face to look more like it's actually ON his face, not just stuck there
  2. Change the hair colour. Bowie has a bright red / orange colour on the cover, much like the inside of a grapefruit. But I had to get the right balance of red and orange, since too much red would make Noah look like _, and too much orange would make him look like Pennywise.
  3. White light at the bottom, where the title goes. It also needed a slight glow to it, since initially, the transition from white to photo was very rough.
  4. Remove background to add in a plain white background in it's place.

I then exported it as a png, and I think it looks pretty darn good :D
Ta-dah! A complete album cover. 

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