Because part of this portfolio will involve creating a digipak for a single release, including the album artwork, the purpose of this task, creating our own "Opies", was to develop our skills in the Adobe Photoshop package which we will probably use to design the album, and subsequent advert for it.
My "Opie" can be seen below;
An "Opie" refers to the work of artist Julian Opie, who created the artwork to Blur's 2000 greatest hits album (see below). We thought it would be interesting to try and create our own to not only develop our creativity and Photoshop skills, but to get us to begin to think about the design of our own artwork - it needs to be as creative and innovative as possible to sell and stand as something representing a particular artist. I was inspired by the artwork as it is highly creative and therefore interesting - a must for album artwork!
Blur's Greatest Hits Album Cover
I feel that the image turned out really successfully, matching quite well my appearance on the particular day. Because we used Photoshop quite at AS in order to produce our production company logo I was already familiar with its inference and so found the task quite easy. It involved taking a photo of myself via PhotoBooth and importing this onto a blank canvas. I drew around, using the lasso tool, a specific part of my face, e.g. the head, and copied this to a new layer. I then filled this section with a single colour representative of the area. This process was repeated until the original image was covered by the cartoon-like layers. Finally, the "Opie" was tidied up by erasing away the rough edges and adding shadow lines into my hair.
I may look at this technique when I come to design my own artwork, depending on the song I chose and the visual style of the artist.
