Another challenge for the fun of it - Continued...

[Ross Macintosh]

Wow, the response to the 'design your own CD cover art' challenge has been truly great. The thread was getting rather taxing on bandwith so I thought it proper for it to continue here. You can find the original thread here.

I've come up with another CD for my band 'Altered States'. The coverart features a pic by Ian Britton from the FreePhoto.com website. Note the fairly restrictive copyright notice before using their images.

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[This message was edited by Ross Macintosh on February 02, 2002 at 15:47.]

[pduggan]

Can't see Ross's 'Altered States' without thinking of Glasgow's own Altered Images, which was fronted by the lovely Clare Grogan. So here's a link I found from a quick Google search!

Peter</p>

Peat Stack or Pete's Tack?</p>

Train of thought (to a Scotsman of my age):
Gregory's Girl... Clare Grogan in a beret... sigh!

[This message was edited by Peter Duggan on February 03, 2002 at 05:28.]

[Alan.]

My second attempt.

Alan

[Briar]

Twinkle toes !!!

Brian. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

[RJ Swift]

Hey guys,

The guys I designed this for like it very much. I descovered another program dealing with text called "Pixel 3D". This program lets you put your own textures from your hard drive. Also, it let me apply three different textures (front, bevel, and side of the text). It's almost the perfect program except when I save it and open it in photoshop, the image seems to lose quality (look at "Deadly Mindz" title and the two "G"s). The two "G"s (one is foward and the other is backwards) has a edited photo of ashes on the front and an edited photo of gold metal on the bevel and sides. The textures I used for the "Deadly Mindz" letters is a picture of diamonds that I minipulated and applied on the front as a texture. On the bevel and the sides, I applied a photo of gold that I took myself and minipulated. I'm going back and retouching the guys' photos, too. Hopefully they will take some better ones, because these aren't out of focus or badly scanned. They were bad pictures to begin with. This is just an early draft. Hope you like it somewhat. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Ricardo J. Swift

[This message was edited by RJ Swift on February 03, 2002 at 23:10.]

[RAMWolff44]

I REALLY like that effect on your "clones"!! What did you do to achieve that effect??? curious minds want to know.

Will the ReAL Ross Macintosh PLEASE step forward and answer the question and NO cloneshae's please [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

[Ross Macintosh]

Just to let you know: I'm not really strange. A wee bit peculiar, but not strange. My day job requires very controlled exercising of my creativity. The Xara stuff I do is largely just for fun and I do try to let myself loosen up. (I never get loose enough to put real horns on my head or wear leather hotpants! [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img] )

The clones were created by making a bitmap copies and altering them with a freeware bitmap effects filter called "Edgeworks" by Steve Upham. His site is called cybia.co.uk and he generously shares a number of great filters he has developed. In addition I have his embossing and swap filters - the three are really quite useful and work great with Xara X except the preview window doesn't work right. Of the three filters I find the swap one most useful. Here's an old thread that has examples created using the filters. I think it better highlights the creative possibilities of these filters.

The bald Ross comes from an old thread that was very funny - check it out. It was because the image of bald Ross resurfaced that Gary commented that he thought he'd seen the image before. It was because I was reusing the image that I named my imaginary band 'Altered States'.

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[This message was edited by Ross Macintosh on February 02, 2002 at 19:26.]

[Ross Macintosh]

This one from recording artist DJ Xara was fun to make...

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[Ross Macintosh]

Thanx for posting your real coverart design. If you work at mastering Xara's text creation possibilities you will be outdesigning Pen&Pixel. This example and your earlier one show that the title renderings are the part you need to improve. I suspect those weaknesses are purely technical - you don't yet know how to accomplish what you really want to achieve. Right?

Both of your designs, with better title execution would rival Pen&Pixel's work. Give yourself some time to play with (and thus learn) some Xara-basics and I'm sure you'll discover it is a great tool for the kind of work you want to do.

An aside: I just had a idea for the DJ Drell image. Imagine if he was squating into a cityscape. A giant DJ Drell amongst the buildings that wouldn't come up any higher than his elbows. A Godzilla among men! Anyways its just an idea...

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[RJ Swift]

Hey, everyone!

Well, I'm back again with another cover. Wolf, thanks VERY much for the compliments on my Organyzed Rhime (Oh, yeah, I DID spell it that way on purpose. For hip-hop artists, it's the norm, basicly). This cover is a job that I have been hired to do. I know it's not Pen&Pixel. But, I'm trying [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]. Don't be too hard on me ok? [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]. Thanks guys.

RJ Swift