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PDTV covers... NOW I'm asking for your opinion...

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PDTV covers... NOW I'm asking for your opinion...

Old 01-24-07, 04:24 PM
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PDTV covers... NOW I'm asking for your opinion...

Starting yet another new thread was against my better judgement, but since I'm actually posting in the right place and actually asking for people's opinions, maybe it won't end up as the disaster that my last one did.

I realize that the rules here are pretty strict about "unofficial" DVDs, but that doesn't seem to apply to covers, and since I started some discussion with Michael Corvin in another thread, I thought it'd be nice to show off some of my work and see what some of the other artists think of it.

Please do me a favor and keep the "man, that looks like SHIT" comments to a minimum. I'm looking for constructive criticism about the design of the covers, so it might be better if only fellow artists reply, and I encourage everyone to post their works as well, especially if they've done a similar cover themselves.

You can see one example in Commander Dan's "Work In Progress: Seinfeld" thread, but since I thought showcasing my work in his thread might be confusing, the rest will be shown here. If you can only see the front of the cover, check back for a full version, since I don't usually have smaller versions of the whole cover close at hand. If the front is all I've finished of certain covers (and there are plenty of those), I'll say so in the post.

I'll start with one I've just recently completed, and so far, the front is all I've done. Before anyone starts right off complaining about the colors, the colors for the following cover are based on the coloration of a VHS tape containing a trailer for "Max Headroom: The Original Story". I have a photo of that tape at home, and I'll post it here when I can for comparison.

For now, though, here's the cover:

Old 01-24-07, 05:57 PM
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Am I missing something here? What's the difference between this and the actual vhs tape art besides the text at the top and the color of the sunglasses and suit?

Tell us what you did here.
Old 01-24-07, 09:39 PM
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Originally Posted by BuddyRevell
Am I missing something here? What's the difference between this and the actual vhs tape art besides the text at the top and the color of the sunglasses and suit?

Tell us what you did here.
Changed the colors.

Actually, that's one reason I wanted replies from artists (although I don't mind replies from anyone else, as long as it's not a pointless flame), because "all you did is change the colors" is one thing, and "hmm... how did you manage to change the colors without it being obvious?" is quite another. You have to be pretty precise to change the color of certain areas of an image, especially changing several different adjacent areas in different ways. Otherwise it looks like a child's finger painting.

It's a lot like colorizing a b&w photo, although I don't claim that it's especially hard, it just takes precision. Basically I created areas of color over each of the areas I needed to change, and the opacity and blending mode is different for each area. Once I post the photo of the regular VHS, Beta and Laserdisc next to the VHS trailer, it may become more clear that making a scan of the VHS look like the trailer box wasn't as simple as it might seem.
Old 01-25-07, 12:05 AM
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Okay, here's the reference photo I was talking about:



The items in the photo are, from left to right, a sealed copy on VHS, an opened VHS copy (the cover is slightly faded), a Beta copy, the VHS trailer I based my cover on, and a copy of the film on Laserdisc. Unfortunately, the photo isn't of my stuff (although I do have it on Beta and VHS, I would LOVE to find a Laserdisc or the VHS trailer), so I only had the low-res photo to work from. The colors were sampled from the photo, but also tweaked a bit so they complement each other. Here's the original scan I was working from, after only some initial retouching:



Hopefully that gives everyone a better idea of how much the overall look of the image was changed, while retaining the actual detail. I thought about desaturating the image (i.e., removing the color) and starting from scratch, but the colors on the VHS trailer box were deep and rich, and colors painted over a greyscale image tend to look pretty thin. I felt it best to mix my "Bizarro" colors over the original colors to give everything a more solid look.

This may not be everybody's cup of tea, but that's the explanation of what I did and why.
Old 01-25-07, 12:11 AM
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Okay, here's another image. As I mentioned before, the first example of my work was posted in a thread about Seinfeld covers, and I was asked to show the full cover, so here it is:



Questions and/or constructive criticism would be welcome.

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