Music Poster

Here's my final product for the last Digital Media project. The song I based the poster off of was "The Sounds of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel. At first I was going to use the lyrics, "My words like silent raindrops fell and echoed in the wells of silence," but in the end I diverted from this quite a bit. I ended up referencing the lyrics "In restless dreams I walked alone" and "Fools said I you do not know, that silence like a cancer grows" more than my original lyrics. Overall I think I ended up addressing the message of the entire song rather than focusing on two lines of lyrics...

Basically, I started with the idea of wanting to convey an abstract feeling of unsettling quiet. The song talks about silence growing "like cancer," and I had this idea of putting water over plastic wrap on my scanner and then scanning it as I placed drops of ink that would disperse through the water. I thought this would parallel the idea of silence starting as something small and then taking over everything. I did this many times, but I could never get all the wrinkles out of the plastic wrap or get an image that was big enough to use as the background without becoming pixely. So then I tried filling a clear glass bottle with oil and putting water in it and photographing them as they separated. This looked kind of cool, but the contrast between the yellow oil and clear water wasn't strong enough and I was thinking of a cooler color palette, which wouldn't include yellow. So finally I just filled the bottle with water and a couple drops of ink and photographed it. This ended up being the technique that worked best for me. 

So one day when we were working on this project in class, our teacher said he liked the face in the upper left corner of the poster. I looked at my project and I saw the face for the first time; I'd never even noticed it until he saw it. So of course, I wasn't going to ignore his comment and decided that this face, which unintentionally showed up in the ink/water mixture, would have to be incorporated into my design. 

So with the addition of the face, I decided to change my design altogether, even though my plans were pretty vague before. As for the text, I was originally going to make the words out of the water and ink but that was impossibly difficult. Instead, I wrote the words "Words" "Echo" and "Silence" in charcoal and scanned them in, moving the paper while I scanned. Eventually I got one that I liked and overlaid this in the composition. I put it in Illustrator and did a live trace on it, and then made the preset "Inked Drawing." Then I put a "fresco" filter over the text, then a "feather" effect, and then a "watercolor" filter. Then I warped it with the "fish eye" tool and increased the % of bend and distortion, and then the "twist" tool and again adjusted the % of bend and distortion. I tried to make the text blend into the composition enough so that it looked like part of the design and not something slapped over top. I also tried to make it frame the face a little bit.

Then I took the image back into Photoshop. I used a photo of water in a fountain that I had taken for the project and used the clone stamp at a reduced opacity to add some blue and some texture to parts of the composition, mostly framing the outside. Then I used the dodge and burn tools to emphasize the lines in the ink because they were starting to get a little bit lost, and to bring out the features of the face more so the face didn't look accidental or unapparent. The last step was going back with the paintbrush to darken up some of the letters in the words and add some more lines to some of the letters. 

Overall I'm pretty happy with it, but like most people I think it looked better on the monitor than in the print-out. I also noticed little marks here and there that I would've liked to have removed with the clone stamp, but didn't see them on the screen. I really enjoyed this project, and I think using those printers is slightly less intimidating now :)