Album Cover

          After completing the task of creating an album cover, I feel very satisfied with my work. I had a difficult start as I did not have a vision for what I wanted to create nor did I know what I wanted my 13 items to be. But after some thought of what I was interested in, I found 13 pictures very easily. The easiest part of the project was finding the pictures but the hardest part was applying filters and arranging it on the picture. Being a very decisive person it made it very difficult because I didn't want to finalize my product but after manipulating the photographs, I was able to find an arrangement that I liked.
         The mediums that were used was the program Adobe Photoshop C6. The tools that I used within that program were the move tool, blend modes, the magic wand, the paint tool, layer masks and filters. The blend modes and filters were used to distort the picture. The magic wand was used to remove the backgrounds of pictures and keep the objects that I wanted in them. I also used the crop tool before this to avoid the same problem. This allowed me to blend the pictures more and avoid sharp edges and blocks. The layer masks and paint tool were used to erase segments of pictures that I didn't want to keep and  blend the pictures as well. I also used the move tool to arrange the pictures, resize them and more. 
       My strongest area in this piece of work was maintaining a consistent theme in color. I chose very colorful pictures and I also used vibrant filters to make them stand out. I drifted towards pictures that were solely warms or cools to create a nice contrast between them and make the album color pop. There are few dull areas in my picture, and the dark parts themselves bring out the brighter colors and add to the overall vibrancy of the collage. My weakest point however, was arranging the pictures. I struggled with grasping the idea of arranging them sporadically and without order. At first, I lined them around each other, spread them out and kept them relatively at the same size. But after consulting with my art teacher Miss Cabral, I learned that what makes the pictures blend nicely is overlapping the pictures, over sizing them and adding interesting filters. After learning this, I played around with the pictures some more and created a very nice piece. To conclude, this project taught me to step out of my comfort zone and be creative and free in my thinking, and unique artwork will form as a result.