Rosy Armitage Coursework A2: 50. Finished Inside Panels!

Over the half term I finished editing the inside panels and the spare panel of my digipak.
The images I decided to use were of the rose (Beauty and the Beast and a classic symbol of love), the shoe (Cinderella), Red Riding Hood, and the two tea cups (for their début single, her Name is Alice.) Below are the original pictures I took.

I knew I wanted to have a black and white background with the main object highlighted a specific colour. I selected all the image and added a black and white filter and then I selected the object and tinted it the colour I wanted whilst also altering the saturation to make it stand out a bit more.

For the lyrics, I decided on a font called Euphemia with size 50 for the titles of the songs and size 34 for the actual lyrics. I chose the font because although our band is more rock and metal, those harsher fonts didn't work out when I tried them as they were either unreadable or too fancy. Euphemia was a simple font that worked effectively and also looked quite 'childlike' to fit with the theme.

I experimented putting the lyrics in different positions on the photos to see where they would work best. The most complicated panel to sort out was the Red Riding Hood panel as it had three sets of lyrics all of varying lengths. With the actual layout of the lyrics I kept them in a block formation with '/' to break up each line of the song. I also kept them all in lowercase as in some examples I looked at such as #3 by the Script, the lyrics were either all in lowercase or all in uppercase which looked effective.

As you can see with the rose image I tried the lyrics in different positions on the photo as well as different colours and styles. The most challenging concept was positioning the lyrics around the image whilst keeping the image the focus of the picture.

I added effects on the lyrics themselves All are coloured black and white to keep with the simplistic yet slightly mysterious theme. For the title of the songs I added a drop shadow and an inner glow and for the bulk of the lyrics I tried out some effects however the most effective seemed to be to leave them as they were without effects on them.

As you can see for the spare panel I altered the size (bigger than on the other panels) of the text, changed the colour and added the Truth of the Fallen logo in the top corner as branding is usually seen on the spare panel.

To see the lyrics I used on my digipak and why I chose them view the Lyric post.

After the lyrics had been added on all the images I felt there was something missing - it needed more of a smoke-y, dream-y, fairytale-y look to it so I began researching some ideas such as how to add a smoke effect. I began to mess around with gradients and see what they looked like and ended up experimenting with dark and light gradients on the photos. When adding the light and dark gradients, however I had to begin altering my lyrics so they would actually show up over it however I really liked the effect the gradient had as it made the image seem smoother and more like a dream.

On the picture on the left I have only added a white gradient however I also added black ones on future edits. When adding the gradients it also made my object stand out less so I went over the parts wanted to stand out with the eraser and then blurred the edges to keep the soft effect.

For the cups on the spare panel I didn't use a gradient in order to differ it from the inside panels however I did add a filter called 'Palette Knife' in order to keep with the dream/fairytale theme. The filter made the image look slightly watery and after changing the effects of the filter it came out subtle but effective. I did experiment with adding filters over the top of the image however they didn't look right and I wanted this panel to differ anyway.

Overall, I am really pleased with how the final panels have turned out. The cup panel differs nicely but still follows the them and the three inside panels work effectively and although the effects could be called over used I think they work well with my digipak.