This image is a derivative work based on Chinese New Year by Brian Yap, available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license. Here is what the original looked like.

My random wiki page gave me “Tellef Wagle” as the band name. The quote I got was All science is either physics or stamp collecting. Ernest Rutherford (1871 – 1937), in J. B. Birks “Rutherford at Manchester” (1962)

Instead of using the random interestingness Flickr search that the assignment post suggested, I used FlickrCC, because it generates a random search of Flickr Creative Commons licensed images when you load the page. I chose the third image from that search per the assignment, and followed its link back to Flickr to get the full size image and attribution information.

I did a few image manipulations to the original photo in Photoshop:

I made three copies of the image to three different layers. The bottom layer got a Diffuse Glow filter.

For the middle layer I applied a radial blur. But I didn’t want to blur the whole image, I wanted the blur to radiate out from an oval approximating the shape of the umbrella, so the girl’s face would not blur, but the umbrella spokes would blur and extend toward the edges of the picture. To make that happen I first used the shape tool to create an oval and rotated it so that it more or less matched the shape of the umbrella. Then I CONTROL+clicked on the shape to load a selection of that shape, feathered the oval by 80 pixels or so, and inverted the selection. Then I hid the oval layer, selected my middle image layer, and applied a radial blur with zoom. Then I set the opacity of the middle layer to 50% so it would allow some of the bottom layer to show through – it just looks prettier that way.

For the top image I applied a gaussian blur of 10 pixels and set the blend mode to soft light. This softened the image but allows detail from the two bottom layers to show through.

Once I was happy with the image I worked on the text. The font I chose is called Defused. I sampled purple from the girl’s sleeve and used that to write the album name. Then I sampled lighter purple to make the stroke. I used my CONTROL+click trick on the text layer to select just those pixels, then used Edit > Stroke and applied a 3 pixel stroke using the lighter purple color. I like!

By the way I picked purple to contrast against the yellow and green color up there in the corner.

For the album title I added the text in four stages so that I got four separate layers. I rotated each one using transform and moved them where I wanted them. I sampled red from the girl’s clothing for the text color. I liked the stroke effect so much that I did it again for the album title, but this time I sampled near-black from the girl’s hair.

For completely random elements to start with I think it came together in a nice way. This was a fun assignment.

Here’s my first visual assignment. I wanted to do the album cover because I thought it would be neat to see what you could get when you combine three random things together. The random wikipedia article gods decided that my band name should be synochoneura, and all though I don’t know how to pronounce it it sounds like a solid band name to me. Then my album title is the last part of a quote from Margaret Cho, which also seems like a fitting title to an album. Finally when I went onto flickr it gave me this nice little picture of a sunset to use. I thought the pretty was pretty cool as it is so I didn’t want to do anything to alter it, but I did resize it so it isn’t as big. Hope you guys like it!

This is the image from assignment An Album Cover. The blog will be fleshed out further in a bit.

*: I found this assignment to be both the most fun and most frustrating one. The assignment calls for taking the title of a random Wikipedia article, the last four words of a random quote, and one of the pictures of the top images on Flickr for the past seven days. The first part was easy and I felt satisfied with the name that I got the first time, though I did check out a few other random article titles but felt the first was the best. The second section was a bit difficult, in that the link in the assignment didn’t actually take me to a page that would change the quotes available, it was rather static. I stuck with the last four words because I figured that I could make them work. It was the acquisition of the image from Flickr that posed the most difficulty, as the vast majority of them had all rights reserved to them, so I couldn’t just grab one at random. But I did like what I did with the image: making the bear a center point for color, with the rest of the image tuned black and white, as well as the font that I chose for the band and album’s name, and how I placed them in logical positions on the image.
 

I did the album cover assignment with this result:

I thought it was amusing. Edited with Picasa. That’s one dramatic pidgeon.

I present to you, the new Indie Acoustic soft melodies of Radioimmunodetection with their first album,  ”At the Expense of Truth.”

This new band of a sweet rabbit and her squirrel background dancers sing titles such as, “Hibernating With you,” “Breaking Into the Vegetable Garden,” and my personal favorite, “Do You Want to Do What Bunnies Do (if you know what I mean)?” This CD is sure to sooth the soul and warm you up on any cold night. On sale now for only seven carrots and twelve acorns! What a steal!

I found the picture from the random Flickr like the assignment said, the last words are from the quote, “Be not so bigoted to any custom as to worship it at the expense of truth” by Johann Georg von Zimmerman (10 points if you comment here and know what he did). I then uploaded the picture to picnik.com and played around with the brightness, the exposure, different color patterns, lighting, and the fonts for the album title. I think I got really lucky with an already cool picture from the random search and a word as pretentious as that could be the name of an Indie band.

Now to figure out what in the world to do for design…Expect some Harry Potter though (how have I had this blog for this long and not outnerded myself with my dedication to HP?).