Jessica Marshall's E-Portfolio
Book Cover
The purpose of this project was to become familiar with the program Gimp. This program is an image editing software. The objective was to create a composite image from photographs in order to create a bookcover. I created two bookcovers using different effects and techniques. Below are the images that I created through this introduction to Gimp.
In creating the first book cover, I chose 5 images. My intention was to create a collage with these images. Due to the subject matter, Asia, I chose red as my base color. I used the shape tools and the free form tool in order to create the separate pieces of the sun - each piece is from a separate photo. For the background, I chose a white photo and applied a Gausian blur so that the features in the photo would not distract from the pieced together sun. Once I pieced the sun together, I smudged the edges to better blend the pieces together, and I used a small stroke around the entirety of the sun to emphasize the unity of the final image. I incorporated another prevalently used color in Asia as the border, yellow. To round off the triadic color scheme, I chose a blue to cap the image and to provide a place for my title.
For the second book cover, I decided to take two images and blend them together. I chose a picture from Vietnam and Germany and merged them together for the cover of a book about growing up biracial. I found two buildings that had yellows and taupe colors in them that were taken from an angle. I used the left image as my base image. I cropped half of the building out of the right image and scaled it to match the height of the left image. I then copied and pasted the image, as a separate layer, on the same canvas as the left image, and I applied a white layer mask to the layer. I used the blend tool and swept from left to right in order to fade the two images into each other. The next step was trying to further match the colors between the two images. For this, I adjusted the color and hue saturation to the right image. I then adjusted the color and hue saturation to the left image. In an attempt to better match the color of the skies, I adjusted the blue settings in the left image (I didn't quite make it there). After I had the colors to an approximation of what I wanted, I cropped the images so that the focus would be on the buildings as opposed to the surrounding areas. I flattened the image. To create space for the title, I created a box and applied a Gausian blur repeatedly (4 times). I adjusted the brightness and contrast of the box to make sure that the title would pop. To balance the yellows and reds, and to borrow from the blue in the sky, I used a deep blue color for the title. I mixed fonts to create some further texture.
