Track Listing (artist – song):

1. Martha Bee & The Buzz – Slide Guy
2. Timmmmy Boyd – The ShopVac Shake
3. The Bavettes – No, No, Nobody
4. Professor Noiz and Doktor Gee – Nice Attitude
5. Stella Meme & The Streetcars – Open Source by Starlight
6. Ling Ting and the Tongs – Charlie Chan Can Can
7. Rebekkah Oblivion – Leopard Skin Pillbox for Dad
8. Chauncey Gardner Campbell – Take a Chance on Me
9. DJ Dr. Jones and his Sonic Lamb Chops – Gimme Some Vee
10. The Cog Dawgs – Chiba-bound and Downes
11. Misha, Andy and a Pair of Bens –  Oh Papa in Law (Barbershop Quartet Remix)
12. LisaM – Lecture Me Later
13. The David Kernohan Experience - Apocalypse Follows
14. James Groom – Alexander’s Ragtime Band

The Assignment: The objective of the Turn It Up Man assignment is to create an original album cover for a compilation album and to list the album’s songs. I believe it’s all supposed to be made up or fake. At least that’s the thought that guided me while doing the assignment.

The Process: A single frame of a clip from The World’s Greatest Sinner video was the starting point for this album cover. The foreground bit of the Timothy Carey character playing guitar was isolated and exported from GIMP to Inkscape. As I was just tweaking and experimenting with the software, I can’t well explain what I did. The finished result was imported back in to GIMP where it now appears nearly like a hand-drawn sketch.

The lady playing saxophone was isolated as a layer mask and pasted as new layer above the background layer. The background layer had a few focus tricks and color adjustments done to make it all blurry. This is why the “hand-drawn” crouched Carey and the Saxophone lady standout the way they do.

The album title and the medallion with text were both done in Inkscape and imported to GIMP as a PNG file. The blurp of text on the left was done in GIMP. I’m still not sure what the advantage of doing the text in vector form is.

The Story: The title Let’s Spazz quickly came to mind after I discovered this cool new assignment yesterday. I came up with song and names of artists while riding the train in to work yesterday. The idea to use Timothy Carey’s epic rock & roll scene for the album cover came very early in the process as well.

I wish I could do a better job of documenting this one. It took a lot of time and energy. I’m fairly satisfied with how the finished product approximates the original concept. The chance to use all these different tools is certainly fun and makes it feel as though I’m gaining better facility with them.