Album Art Cover

Our assignment was to create an album cover.

The title comes from the first randomized Wikipedia page, and the title of the album comes from the last quote in the quote website.



Well, I landed on Garneau, a town in Canada, and "...equally wise- and equally foolish."

The last flickr photo I landed on was:


Turning it black&white:



As you can see, I found the photo and tried to think of what I could do with it. I first turned it black and white to stay within the constraints of the requirements.

The last idea the one that really took off, in my mind. I wanted to challenge myself, to try a technique that always looked fascinating but never actually attempted. I wanted a vector graphics piece which is characterized by sharp vector lines, and smooth, mono-color gradient fills. I didn't remember much from my vector days in high school, so I asked Dr. Gaskins and she pointed me to Adobe Illustrator. Learned about the "live trace" tool (TAKE THAT WACOM, no one will want to buy the inkling after knowing this particular affordance of the program.)

The basics: after I told my classmates, a lot of them didn't know what a vexel was. Or even a vector. After describing, some shook their heads, but I don't know if that was just to agree or if they really understood. So here's the breakdown-

pen tool: used to create a path, which can be filled or "stroked" (meaning has outlining line)
raster: made up of pixels; you can edit and change as you will, but change the size and the shape can become pixelized.

a vector
-good for scaling and industrial use, made through shapes or can be created using customized shapes with the pen tool

a vexel
-a vector graphic done in pixels, came about as a term for a pixel graphic done in vector-style


I ended up minimally processing the photo by posterizing it at 20% so I could get some help getting started vectoring it.

This end result, after wrestling with vectoring some 200+ layers, most of which were comprised of hairs and were extremely time consuming:


and ended up processing the picture more with vectors, and ended up as this: