
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.
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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.
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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.


Update
I forgot to post this link originally, but you can stream the entire album over on my wife’s virb page.