I remember when I was younger that I was very much into music. My music. I collected albums and would just sit and listen as it brought me to a different world. These days, it seems as though recording artists aren’t too concerned with creating albums anymore. They seem more content with 1 or 2 singles and cashing out. This is probably the best way to go for most of these musicians as they lack the talent to produce more than one song every couple of years. So when I swathe “Album Cover” assignment, I figured I would give it a go. It was basically a plug and play assignment though. I had to click here and there and select a predetermined item to use an integral part of my album cover. It certainly made things easier, but the creativity was a tad hindered and the major pieces of the work were left to chance.

I visited this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random   to select my band name, which turned out to be “Red Gum”. Interesting to say the least. I then visited http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 to select the name of the album which turned out to be: “Things You Only Hoped For”. This seemed a tad egotistical to me, but then again, so are musicians, so I guess it works. Finally, I visited http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days and was told select the third image however, when I viewed the third image, I didn’t think it was appropriate for class. It was absolutely perfect though. It was a shot of a beautiful woman kneeling on a bed taking off her red panties. I thought to myself, “RedGum” “Things you only hoped for”… this goes pretty good! But I decided to refresh the screen and go with the next one in line which was the boy running down the hill seemingly excited about something.

To edit the my work, I used Gimp 2.8. I simply added the text boxes and typed in red letters. Nothing fancy. But it was all I hoped for.

So I have to admit- this is not the first time I have done this assignment. In my (freshman?) year of high school this idea was floating around Facebook and a ton of people did it, including myself. I had a blast doing this assignment, and it made me laugh really hard.

First step: pick a name. I actually cheated on this step, because the first name generated for me was “Athabasca (Saskatchewan provincial electoral district)”. That’s just a bit too much of a mouthful for me. So I hit random article again, and this time I came up with  Archibald Clinkard. Not bad! So I continued.

Then came the quote. Oh my gosh, this quote. I actually laughed out loud, which is pretty rare for me. The quote that came up was from Joss Whedon, and the last few lines are priceless.

I could not conceive that [fans] actually wanted me to sign something. It took a long time for me to figure out (a) just say ‘Thank you’ and sign the thing, and (b) smile in the picture, because if you try to just half-smile you’re going to look constipated.

Joss Whedon, Entertainment Weekly, 08-30-13

By this point I was literally praying that I got a good picture on the random flickr image…..and I did. I couldn’t have picked a better one myself.

From there, I opened up photoshop, uploaded the picture, and played around with some fonts. I actually made two different ones, because I am a perfectionist and what else would I be doing at 12:30 a.m.? You can check out the initial scrapped one here, if you’re curious. For some reason, this looks like a Vampire Weekdend-esque album to me, which just makes me laugh even harder.

This assignment was too cool to pass up!  I think that this is a really cool idea.  I wish I had been creative to think of something like this on my own for a post!

So here it is!

I used pixlr again.  I am in love with this web app.  It is so cool and free!!

The Beylerbeyi Event was a revolt during the Ottoman Empire.  It made me think of old empires and bloody wars.  I used orange for this font, and chose a font I thought looked archaic.

The quote is actually a really awesome quote by Einstein.

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

This describes the themes I learned today during the talks and pod casts so well it was kind of creepy.

I had a problem with the image.  Some publishers don’t let you download their images from flickr.  I had to do another random que to get one that wasn’t all copy righted.  I don’t know if the image fits the whole story.  I liked the idea of a kind of revolt against current archaic learning methods.  Why keep beating our heads against the wall, why not just utilize the web and technology of our times to learn more efficiently and quickly.

I made an album of Bruce Lee in “Enter the Dragon” from the same movie name.

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