Back when I was learning a whole lot about music producing, I decided to change my artist's name from Synchroflash to Wizer. The reason being that everything I released under Synchroflash was super amateurish, and that what I am releasing under Wizer is now pro. I was very, very wrong. It didn't take me long to abandon it, but in the process I made some very cool album art, and I want to share how I made it. This was the end result:
Nothing about this is that special, but the background is my favorite part about it.
This is the texture that I used for the background:
I made this texture in a very very interesting way, using a technique I developed, and I use it a whole lot now.
I use a program called Adobe Fireworks for all of my 2d image processing. It is quite powerful and relatively cheap compared to their flagship products, Illustrator and Photoshop. It only costs about $300 (when compared to photoshop's old price, that's cheap) to buy it, and yes you can still buy the cs6 version. I plan on using it for a very long time, so I'm saving money from not getting a subscription.
Fireworks has a really interesting layering engine. You can use it just like any other program that has layers (one layer on top of another), but you can also do some weird image processing with this drop down bar here:
I went to many sites that had free royalty free images, and picked images that looked like it had the right colors/grain that I wanted. Also, through experimentation, I found random images that would tweak the image just the right way with the filters. It is really hard to explain, and is only something that someone would figure out through experimentation. But the concept can be grasped by looking at the edge of my texture, which doesn't look as polished.
Oh hey, look, trees!
Since I flattened the image (turning all the layers of images into one single image), I can't go back and show you the filters I used. But that doesn't matter, since experimentation is crucial, anyways. Here I will show you a section of the filters available.
Part 2 will include how to make a low res texture higher res using rendering, making the colors pop out more and add really neat lighting effects.
