Best Work

This is most likely my favorite project that I'll ever do in Photoshop. Don't mind the cut-off borders, it was supposed to be a design for a CD cover. Our objective obviously was to create a CD cover front (left) and back (right). It could be anything you want: fake or real artist, video game soundtrack, DVD anything! For once I had creativity and I'm really proud of this project. In this project I utilized the extra tricks I learned from tutorials before anyone in my class learned them.

Here are all the tools I used: patch, gradient, lasso and wand, clone stamp, pen, quickmask, brush, type, adjustment layers and changing the blend modes. From what I can remember I used five different pictures in the front cover and four in the back.

I had a lot of inspiration for this one. The CD title is based on the nightclub in GTA:III, the Planetarium, hosted by Andre the Accelerator on Rise FM. Since the radio station plays house/electronic dance music I thought using Ghost In The Shell: SAC would be more appropriate to use. The majority of the pictures used were from the anime, in fact one picture is used as the whole back cover with only three added pictures (one being the Major, Lain from Serial Experiments Lain and Tsukiko from Paranoia Agent). The only thing not anime related was the picture of the turntables.

For the front cover I used a picture of a city (which you can't really see) and changed it to blue. I also added a rain effect I learned using brushes from a tutorial. Then I added a picture and changed it to blue and changed the blend mode and opacity. For more effect I used the clone stamp tool and added extra screens. After that I took a picture of Major Kusanagi, cut out the rest of the background, made her look like a hologram (also from tutorials) and used gradient for the bottom of the hologram. The same goes for the hands and turntables. I wanted to make the title look like the supposed holograms around the Major in a circular kind of way. This is the closest I got to but I'm ok with it. Unfortunately the DJ part at the bottom doesn't get much attention.

At last the back cover which was just the original picture changed to blue. The three main screens are cut out pictures of the female characters, changed them to blue and put them into the original background of Major Kusanagi. Since we had to have a least 10 songs (or whatever) I put in the soundtrack (only 5 songs) from Rise FM and made up the rest of the songs. I added a little something extra by making the song holders into small screens like the ones above it using the pen tool. Since I didn't like the uneven layout of 10 songs I decided to make the 10th song a bonus track and used the smaller blue screen to hold it. The last parts were making the spines for the CD, as you can see the title for both sides and cloned some part of the back cover for the spines. Then I used used the gradient tool at the bottom of the cover since I wanted the song names to be more noticeable. Finally I typed out Bonus Track in an arch over the main screen. Again this was probably my favorite project using Photoshop. I hope in the future I'll have just as much creativity or inspiration as this one.