Album Cover.

I didn't just want to create an album cover for the sake of it,  I wanted mine to have meaning and to relate with the title I was giving it.  The title of the album is ''All the little things''.  I wanted to have the underlying meaning of ''All the little things piece together to make big things happen.''  Hence my album cover you can see below.  It's a light-bulb which on it's own, doesn't look very effective, but inside the light-bulb is a city lit up at night.  Which ties in with the mean, all the little things making something big happen.  Basically, I wanted the motto to reflect the band, and that the four men that make the single band, can make big music, and inspire big things.

1. I won't go into much detail about how I made the above album cover, because I'll explain that in the steps below.  But to sum it up, It was relatively easy.  I kept it simple because I didn't want to overdo it.  I looked at other album covers as you can see in my ''Band Research'' post.  I made sure I saved the cover as a .png file, this way I won't lose any quality during the final process and it'd be easy to edit again if I needed too.  Which I didn't.

2. Anyway, first of all I opened a new template on Photoshop™, I made sure the size was 12 centre metres by 12 centre metres as this is the size an album cover generally is, this just meant changing the properties after going to file > FILE > NEW. 

3. After opening my template, I went to Google images and typed in ''Light-bulb art'' for inspiration and ideas.  I found the picture below of a forest inside a light-bulb, it stood out from the rest because it was so unusual and just generally pretty.  I copied and pasted it into Photoshop™ and used the Pen Tool to cut out the forest image from inside the bulb.  I needed to do this in order to paste my own image in. 

4. After this I wanted to find a decent picture of a city lit up at night-time to tie in with the theme and the feel of the cover.  It had to be at night-time so you could see the effect ''all the small things'' / bulbs could have.  It really worked with the title of the album and I think the image I chose was so high quality, it stood out much more than a normal quality photograph.

I resized and rescaled the image to fit without the boundaries of the bulb and then merged the layers together by alt-clicking the two layers I wanted, right clicking and selecting 'Merge Layers'.

5. The next step may seem a bit tedious, but I really wanted to add a finishing touch to the image.  I cut around the inside of the bulb, selecting the outside of the city image and selected it using the pen tool once again.  I then went into the menu bar and selected LAYER > NEW > LAYER VIA COPY.  This then sent the outside of the city image to a new layer.  I then selected the later, and went into the FILTER tab before selecting BLUR > BOX BLUR.  This then made a subtle, but improved change to my image.  It blurred the edges and made the city look more natural inside of the bulb rather than just an image pasted into another image. 

6. Once this was complete, I moved the image a bit further down to allow room to add the text.  I didn't want to add anything else to the cover as I wanted the city-bulb to be the focus point, and I felt anything else would maybe distract the viewer away from the main part of the cover.  I decided to use some plain, yet quite strong, text.  It stood out and didn't draw too much attention, it wasn't all fancy and hard to read, it just felt right and wasn't too boring either.  The font I used I took from a website called dafont.com and the font is called BEBAS NEUE.  

7. After I put the text into place, I added the name of the album ''All The Small Things''.  I decided to rotate the album title 90 degree's clockwise and put it in the top left.  I also put this writing in a small text and all lower case despite being a title.  I thought this would give a good effect, and again, suit the title ''All The Small Things'' as the writing was small, and in lower case.  The title name should usually jump out and grab the attention of the viewer, but in this instance, I wanted it to be a bit more obscure, just like the reference to the light bulb making big things happen.  In conclusion, the album cover looks really pretty and colourful anyway so even if the underlying message wasn't received by everyone or anybody, it still looked great, and for those that did understand the message, it would have even more impact.