Anchorbeard, the most feared pirate east of the Atlantic. Don’t let his friendly freckles or confident smile fool you.

Anchorbeard, the most feared pirate east of the Atlantic. Don’t let his friendly freckles or confident smile fool you.

Truth and Lies Posters ON SALE

I am beyond excited to let you all know that my viral poster series, Truth and Lies, is now available for purchase! Just check out store.jstnbrbr.com to pick up your favorite poster, starting at just $16 for a print.

Please spread the word to your friends by reblogging this post, as well as on twitter and facebook! a RT would be greatly appreciated

Hope Akin CD

To see the entire project, go to my Behance Student Show profile

This was another project for my color theory class, with the assignment regarding the commercial use of color in CD packaging. I opted to do a CD for a musician/band instead of a DVD for a movie or my own portfolio — above is the final result of the album! But since color was the main aspect of the project, I’ll delve into how I achieved the final look you see here.

Step 1: The Photoshoot
My friend Hope graciously agreed to be photographed for my project. I chose her because a) it wouldn’t be awkward since we knew each other b) she could totally pull of the “singer/songwriter” look, and Savannah lends itself to a rustic image that would be easy to capitalize on c) she has a great name: Hope Akin. Ask your friends if they’ve heard of the new hit single from Hope Akin and I’m sure they’ll bite. I borrowed my neighbor’s guitar for the shoot, and we set off to take some photos!

Below are the four main photos I used throughout the CD packaging (minus the cover, I’ll get to that later) I got out of the shoot. I took about 80.

Obviously, as is, they’re kind of underwhelming. I don’t mean the modeling (Hope was great!) or the quality of the shots themselves, I just mean that if you looked at them your first thought is “oh. photo” not “oh, cool photo!”

Step 2: Editing
Thankfully, step two is where the “oh, cool photo!” factor comes into play. Below I’ll show specifically what I did with the cover photo, but the same technique applied throughout.

This is the cover photo in it’s original state. The first thing I wanted to take care of was the distracting indents in the brick wall behind her, and the second was cropping the photo so that the two cement blocks on either side of her (on the edges of the photo) would no longer be visible.

Problem solved! Next up was the color of the grass and bricks. The grass is yellow, not green, and the bricks are a faded brown, not red. In order to fix this, I just put two layers of red and green on top of the photo and set them to “multiply” so that they’d show through.

Then, of course, taking Hope to the layer above the colors so she wouldn’t be effected by them, as well as getting rid of the straight line that’s made where the green and red meet.

Step 3: Applying
Now that I was satisfied with the image as a whole, I wanted to really start changing the mood of the photo with various photo filters, as well as converting it into the correct CD cover dimensions. A slight problem I encountered was the centering of Hope on the cover - the neck of the guitar sticks out too far for the real center to feel centered. But after playing around with it, I came up with a solution.

It was a nice product, but it still needed to be more dramatic. So I took a dark red brush to create a vignette type of effect around the edges of the photo.

After this I knew right away I had hit upon the final look I was going for, and was ready to apply the finishing touches to the cover, as well as begin on a similar process for all the other photos I was going to use throughout the CD. (Forgot to mention I also took the white logo on the guitar off, and the wet spot on her knee she got from kneeling on the grass)

A little fairy dust and bokeh…

and some hand written script, and the album is complete!

Step 4: Printing
Instead of getting it printed professionally, I decided to save money by buying some photo paper and investing in a color printer. The results were really high quality, but it took me five tries to get the CD correctly printed - which wasted 5 CDs I had (and ink…). To make the booklet, I glued the two sheets together and cut them out with an exacto knife and ruler. Since photo paper is thicker than normal paper, and both the booklet and CD tray involved stacking two sheets on top of each other, some of the dimensions were a bit large. I had to cut a sliver off the CD tray and part of it still sticks up slightly past the edge of the CD.

Final Photos: (not posted anywhere else due to coloring issues…)

Tints & Shades: Process

This was a project for my Color Theory class. The purpose of the project was to explore tints and shades, and their emotional impact on the viewer. I’ve always been absolutely mesmerized by the famous DKNG process videos and ever since I’ve watched the first one several months ago I’ve wanted to make my own (though it falls fall short of DKNG’s work)

Recording my process was actually really challenging - I don’t like showing anyone my process. I’m all about the final presentation, making sure everything looks perfect because I think it’s more magical for the viewer this way. I didn’t want to devalue the finished project by allowing people to see how I did it, thus taking away the mystery about it (now you know why Dad has never explained that magic trick he’s done since you were five), and make them think “oh, that wasn’t too hard” or something like that. So for me to open up and show people how I work was a little nerve racking, mainly because I started the project with no idea of how I wanted it to look as a finished product. I knew I wanted the futuristic, glowing swoosh look (I looked it up - that’s definitely what they’re calling it these days), and I knew I wanted to use the photo of Derrick Rose, but beyond that, I really had no idea what I wanted to do with the poster. But that’s why the video is so unique, because the viewer gets to share in the adventure of my creation with me.

Tints Poster:

Derrick Rose - Tints

I really liked how the tints poster turned out, it’s definitely my favorite of the two, although for all the trouble I had in making the shades version, I think it also turned out fairly successful.

Shades Poster:

Derrick Rose - Shades

Though this is simply a foundations course, so it’s not a graphic design course, I decided to go an extra step in creating some collateral for the project. Designing two posters without a purpose is pointless to me, so I integrated them into advertising spots - both large scale (outdoor) and small scale (magazine) to give the viewer an idea of the potential.

Advertisements:

(I find it funny that the adidas logo is obscured by the awning)

(Thought about desaturating that yellow wheel, but never did for some reason)

Thanks for reading - I hope you enjoyed the video and other material. Let me know in the comments!