I just finished making an image for the CD insert of a mix I made for a friend. I thought it turned out really well, but when I printed it the colors were a lot brigher and the lines aren’t defined as much, so it doesn’t look half as good. I guess that’s what you get for buying a $50 printer, although it’s worked great for everything else.

Anyway, I thought I’d post the image here so that at least somebody would see it as it was intended…

• The original background image (53k)
• The final front cover and insert* (65k)

* before being printed

(boring details of how I made the images below… most of you probably won’t be interested)

For the cover, I wanted to use a drawing and phrase from an MxPx shirt, but that image was too small. So, I used Google’s image search to find this image. That image was an actual photograph of the real shirt, so it had lines and ruffles and all kinds of stuff, which actually turned out to be cool. But, after cropping the actual picture, it still wasn’t big enough for the CD cover, so, I used the GIMP’s “smart enlarge” script to blow it up without losing a lot of quality. Several hours later I had an image that would work. The drawing itself was the right size, but I hadn’t cropped enough of the background. So, instead of going through it all over, I just copied and pasted sections of the background to fill in the extra space, and used the Smudge tool to wipe out the lines and make it look clean. I didn’t like the font “boys are mean” was written in, so I covered that over and used AvantGarde BK BT.

For the second image, I chose a nice deep blue (not sure exactly, but it’s close to #5E8EB2) and made a symmetrical, conical gradient from the lower right-hand corner to the upper-left, leaving a decent amount of pure white in the upper-left. Then I ran the image through the GIMP’s Cubism filter, played with the tile size and saturation a bit, and that was it. Then, inside Mediaface II, I put the track list over top of it using the Conga font.