Barf Illustrations

I hope Mr. Craig Yoe doesn't mind I put these up here.

Doin' Some Fixin's!

I've lately been looking a lot at the CD designs I made for my sister's wedding to see what kind of improvements I could make and thought I'd make the composition of the back cover make more sense. There were small things I wanted to fix so I deciced to change 'em real quick and thought I'd share what I've done.

*ORIGINAL*

In the original picture I found that the larger text (the list of songs) were really small and all cramped together. The CD covers were trimmed into their 4.75" x 4.75" size, which is pretty small so I don't think the text would have read too well. I never tested it out, but I've seen a CD cover in that size and thought I made the text too small and too cramped together for that particular size.

*IMPROVEMENTS MADE*

So what I did was strectch down the text more to make it seem bigger and less cramped. I moved the black area of the background down a bit and nudged the text around for it to fit nicely in that area. I then shrunk down a bit the caricatures with the word bubbles to give more focus to the text. I noticed I could've made the area with the caricatures and word bubbles smaller to put more emphasis on the text, but then I would've made the text inside the word bubbles too small, considering the size of paper it is going to be printed on, and it might also make the whole composition feel a little out of balance.

You can flip them back and forth with the arrow keys to see the before and after. You can do so with the new image viewer thing from Blogger.

Doing this really helps me remind myself that the elements in a composition should make sense with not only what they are subjectively, but how they are placed and work together in the composition in a way that they can make sense together and read well as well as look visually interesting, appealing and balanced as a whole for the viewer.

This excercise also helps me see how I myself work and start on something, particularly with figuring out the composition first and spacing of where and why things will be placed in the picture in a way where sense can be made instead of going into it without actually thinking too much about the whole thing, which I hope to never do again. This I think can help me apply what I've learned here into another new illustration.

There's other things in the back cover I'd like to fix, like the dude's head seeming a bit wonky for example, but I wanted to focus more on composition for this one.

The purpose of doing this was to not make the picture be all perfect, but to understand exactly what I'm doing as I'm working on a picture so that the entire thing can make sense for me as well as the viewer.

The Wedding From Outer Space!

Today was my sister's wedding, so this post goes out to her, her husband and their new life together!

I did a CD cover and back cover for some music albums that she and her husband gave out at the wedding reception. Sort of a "thank you for coming" gift to the guests. My sister and her husband came up with the name "The Wedding from Outer Space" for the wedding and we came up with the idea of two aliens getting hitched at a church, with a skinhead, a punk and a mod thrown in the back. My sister and husband love all kinds of music like ska, punk, rockabilly, psychobilly and they themselves picked out all of the songs for the album. They even DJed at the reception.

The title is written in Catalan because the wedding took place in Spain. Me and my family couldn't go to Spain, but we saw the whole wedding and talked and met some people through Skype. You'd think watching a wedding through Skype would be a little weird, but it actually worked out really great! We saw a little bit of the reception where they gave the toast and a friend of my sister's and me showed me the CD album through Skype with my designs and told me she really liked it, which I though was neat-o!

Here's the back cover:

She wanted it to have carcicatures of her and her husband with their cat all saying "Thank You you for coming!" in Catalan.

My sister was originally going to do the designs herself, but she was so busy preparing other stuff for the wedding that I decided it was best I do it all. They were sort of done in the last minute so you might see some mistakes here and there, but I plan to fix them later on for a future portfolio.

It was really cool to see my sissy-poo get married and I know that she'll live an awesome and happy life with her man!

*NOW OTHER STUFF*

Sorry I haven't been putting up anything of the music vid or anything else, but I have have been working on the music vid like a sonuvabitch and will show you you some stuff soon. I also plan to get back to work on other stuff (like my film for instance) as I work on the music vid. I'm usually not very good when it comes to working like that, but I'll try my best to work on different stuff at the same time.

So come back again if'n you wanna see some new stuff!