Original images by - Beth Icard
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All songs by Lana Del Rey, courtesy of Youtube
Alrighty. So, basically, I was just playing and having fun with the assignment this week. I really liked the John Lennon poster on the idea page, so I wanted to try and see if I could make my own version.
I found the Youtube tutorial for that exact image, and once I figured out the mechanics of it, I went to work making my own versions.
I'm a huge Lana Del Rey fan. I love her music, and her lyrics are just gorgeous. Because this week we learned a lot about emotionally charging an image, I thought her work was appropriate to play with. I made the first two posters first (the ones with lyrics from "Tomorrow Never Came" and "Love") as direct imitations of the Lennon poster. I wanted to see what happened if I put text on the right side instead of the left side, so I made both versions.
I was having so much fun that I just kept going. The poster with lyrics from "Gods and Monsters" I made kind of by accident. I wanted to see what the "posterize" adjustment layer did, so I applied it to the only black-and-white image I was working with (I like the effect less on color images). The result was so cool that I slapped some lyrics on. I just overlaid them and gave the text an outer stroke so it was more readable. (The image-through-the-text effect didn't really work on that particular image -- you couldn't really see the words -- so I just added the lyrics on top of the image.) I picked a text color at random, and found myself delighted with the apocalyptic effect resulting from the combination of the image, the font, the font color, and the lyrics.
Then I wanted to see what happened if I placed words across an entire image, not just on the left or the right. I used the same process for the last two posters ("Old Money" and "Young and Beautiful") that I used on the ones I made imitating the Lennon poster, but I broke from the format. I didn't use black and I overlaid the words across the entire image.
I also really enjoyed playing with text this week. I kind of deliberately broke some of the "rules" about text that we've learned. I don't really care if every single word is easily readable in these images. That wasn't the point. I was more interested in the interplay between text that isn't quite readable and an image that isn't quite easy to see through the text.
I'm a huge Lana Del Rey fan. I love her music, and her lyrics are just gorgeous. Because this week we learned a lot about emotionally charging an image, I thought her work was appropriate to play with. I made the first two posters first (the ones with lyrics from "Tomorrow Never Came" and "Love") as direct imitations of the Lennon poster. I wanted to see what happened if I put text on the right side instead of the left side, so I made both versions.
I was having so much fun that I just kept going. The poster with lyrics from "Gods and Monsters" I made kind of by accident. I wanted to see what the "posterize" adjustment layer did, so I applied it to the only black-and-white image I was working with (I like the effect less on color images). The result was so cool that I slapped some lyrics on. I just overlaid them and gave the text an outer stroke so it was more readable. (The image-through-the-text effect didn't really work on that particular image -- you couldn't really see the words -- so I just added the lyrics on top of the image.) I picked a text color at random, and found myself delighted with the apocalyptic effect resulting from the combination of the image, the font, the font color, and the lyrics.
Then I wanted to see what happened if I placed words across an entire image, not just on the left or the right. I used the same process for the last two posters ("Old Money" and "Young and Beautiful") that I used on the ones I made imitating the Lennon poster, but I broke from the format. I didn't use black and I overlaid the words across the entire image.
I also really enjoyed playing with text this week. I kind of deliberately broke some of the "rules" about text that we've learned. I don't really care if every single word is easily readable in these images. That wasn't the point. I was more interested in the interplay between text that isn't quite readable and an image that isn't quite easy to see through the text.
Process:
- Except for the apocalyptic poster, the process for each one of these was basically the same.
- First I added a fill layer over each background, either on only half the image or over the whole thing.
- Then I used the text tool to place the lyrics where I wanted. I sized the text and adjusted the leading. Again, I wasn't focused on making sure every single word was immediately readable, so I used a tighter leading than I usually would have, which was advantageous for revealing the image behind.
- I crtl-clicked the text layer to select the text, deactivated the text layer, highlighted the fill layer, and deleted the selection from the fill layer so the text became imprinted in the fill layer.
- On the last two posters, I decreased the opacity of the red fill layer so you could see some of the underlying image through it.
- If there were places where I did want the text to be more readable than it was, I used the doge tool on the midtones and shadows of the parts of the background layer that were under the letters I was worried about, and then in a few places I brushed on some extremely opaque (3%-5%) white to pop the letters just a bit.
- I added another fill layer but then made the fill percentage 0% so it wasn't visible. But even though it wasn't visible, I could still add layer effects, so I added a white inner glow (of various sizes, depending on what I wanted) and then a stroke set to "inside" to create the border on each image.
Design thoughts:
- Like I said, 100% readable text wasn't the point this time. I was more interested in what would happen if you could only see part of an image through text or, conversely, what would happen if you could only make out some of the text over an image.
- Even though I set out imitating the Lennon poster where the text was only present on half of the image, I think I like the posters with text across the whole image space a little bit better. I have affection for each of the images, but I think it's a little more interesting to use text set across the entire image to reveal the picture than using it only over half.
- There's a very particular "feeling" in Lana Del Rey songs -- a sort of sad, dreamy thing -- that I was aiming to convey with these images.