Day 1: Artwork Composition #1 for ‘Paradise’

As you know by now, I create my own cover art for my songs. I have just written a new song called Paradise for which I need to design a new piece for the cover

For my first design, I had a very simple idea that included a picture of the sky that I took as a freshman in college. I figured it would be appropriate for a song about paradise to have a picture of clouds, a major characteristic of heaven. See my vision?

I started with creating a square-shaped , 3000x3000 pixel artboard to work with so that I could lay the image out and scale it to fill the artboard. I make the scale larger so that the image is clearer, even when zooming in on it (just a preference). After I scaled the image of the sky to fill the artboard, I put the title of the song in large font in the upper center of the image for contrast of the lettering, and I didn’t want the text to overlap with the clouds. I cycled through some of my fonts to find one that stuck out to me.Under the song title, I put “jazerro” in smaller font to draw more attention to the song title. On both sides of “jazerro” I made lines using dashes because I knew that by doing it that way, they would be evenly, vertically centered with the text. When I was finished putting all the text on the artboard, I duplicated it and put a blur effect on it to make the text look like it’s glowing. There’s a timelapse of the process thus far, right below.

I haven’t had to do a lot of screen recording yet, so I settled for a free, random application that apparently has a recording limit, but whatever. After the progress in the video, I made some more edits to clean it up a little bit. I capitalized all of the text to even up the heights of each letter and shrunk the “jazerro” text for a sleeker look.

Here is the end product.

In all, this one took me about a half hour because the design is very simple and the image I took of the clouds does most of the work. I will be working on more designs for Paradise, so don’t sleep!