It seems that every day is another challenge to out perform myself. Meaning that each day I get worried that I won’t have any good ideas left by the end of the year. But I’m finding out that once I actually commit to doing a picture the creative process takes over my mind and I no longer worry. Instead I get wrapped up in the moment and let my mind lead me from one shot to the next.
One of my more ambitious goals this year is taking part in Project 365. Where I will be taking one photo of myself each day for the entire year. If that sounds boring, I assure you it’s not. I think of it as a daily creative exercise to help me (1) learn more about photography and (2) explore my thoughts and emotions and try to convey those in a photograph.
For Christmas this past year my wife recorded an album of 11 songs to send to my grandparents. So me being the awesome husband I am I created a custom album sleeve for her. Just a simple front and back design that would fit on an 8.5×11 template that we could assemble ourselves. By the way, if you’re looking for a good resource for album cover templates I recommend checking out theses oasis cd templates. They came in quite handy.
So like all good projects, we started with a little brainstorming session and some quick sketches while we talked about what to title the cd. We settled on “HYMNS: by Amanda And Other Songs You Can Sing to Jesus”.
After she decided on the design I went from sketch straight in to illustrator. I used a mixture of live trace (for all the hand-drawn type on the tracklist) and tracing the shapes by hand. As far as choosing a color palette, I wanted it to be something soft and wintery. I did have snow flakes in my initial design, but decided against them when it went to the printer. I think the light gray of the sky and the stark black silhouette of the trees and house do a good job of giving off that cold, winter-like feeling. And the North Star was icing on the cake.
I forgot to post this link originally, but you can stream the entire album over on my wife’s virb page.