Reflective ReportReflective Report on “The Undying” Book Cover

Student Name: Wakaba Peter Kariuki, Student No: M00468041, Blog: pwakaba.wordpress.com

11/19/2013

“The Undying” - Reflective ReportFor our New Media coursework we were asked to design a book cover and spine with a theme of our choice. I came up with a horror themed book cover titled: “The Undying”. The book is a recreation of horror stories and stereotypes I have heard over time. For the book cover, I settled on featuring a terrifying picture of an undead person (zombie) to portray the book’s horror theme.

Having settled on the theme, I went ahead to plan the layout of the book cover, I brainstormed on possible ways of featuring the zombie while keeping it realistic and in scope. I made sketches on paper and had my peers review the design. While watching my favorite TV series, The Walking Dead, which is about zombies, I got the idea to take a picture of myself and transform it into a terrifying zombie portrait. I thought of compositing the picture with one of a forest since most of the zombie in the TV series seemed to appear from the woods and use the composite for my book cover.

For the picture capture, I decided to use my Nikon Coolpix L820 Camera which has 16.0 Megapixels because it captures great portraits. I asked my friend to help capture the picture while I posed as a zombie. We had to take the picture in the afternoon, before sunset, because my camera is poor in low light conditions. We took several snaps as I tried many zombie poses. We also tried different locations, we tried to shoot in the house but found that the pictures were lowly exposed, so we decided to take the pictures outdoors.

After settling on the snaps, I proceeded to my laptop which is a Dell Inspiron 4110 with 6GB RAM, 500GB Hard Disk and an Intel i5 processor, which makes it very good for running applications such as Adobe Photoshop fast. I imported the pictures from the camera to my computer and browsed through to select the best snap for the zombie manipulation. For the photo editing, I used Photoshop since it is one of the best photo editing suite and has a wide community so finding tutorials is easy.

In Photoshop, I created a new document with the dimensions 2500x3216, set a vertical guide at 400px for the spine and set its background to dark green since the books theme is dark horror. I then placed the snapped image and removed the background using magic wand and quick selection tools. I then darkened the layer using levels adjustment. I loaded the image of a skull and transformed it using free transform to fit and warp it onto my head. I then applied a clipping mask on the skull to constrain it on my face and used the brush tool to reveal the skull on the left eye and cheek in order to create the illusion that the left eye had been shot and the skin removed. I reduced the opacity of the skull to 46% to make it less vivid. I loaded a second skull with mouth open and transformed it to fit on to my mouth and created a clipping mask around it and revealed the skull’s teeth using the brush tool. I sharpened the teeth using brush tool since zombies are known to have sharp teeth. I used the burn tool to darken my right eye.

To create bloody effects on my image, I loaded a rusty metal texture on to the canvas, created a clipping mask around my face and set its blend mode to multiply. I then transformed it onto the left side of my face. I used brush tool to reveal the texture on the skull to create the illusion that my eye had been shot off. I duplicated the texture layer and applied it to the right side of my face, my hands, my neck and my t-shirt to make the bloody and dirty effect. For the t-shirt stains, I had to use soft light blend mode to blend it more realistically. Using the brush tool, I removed hard edges around the texture layers.

Having completed the zombie effects, I loaded the woods picture into the canvas to make it appear as if the zombie was coming out of the woods. I then used curves, levels and hue/saturation adjustment layers to darken the image reduce the green color of the woods and achieve a slight black and white effect. I then loaded the smoke texture and transformed it onto the image to make it look like the woods were foggy and set the textures blend mode to screen.

I needed to make the zombie group to have dark edges around the background. To achieve this, I added a new layer filled with 50% gray, then used lens correction filter to add a vignette around the edges. I adjusted the vignette radius and size till I achieved the darkened edges effect.

For the book title, I used the “Garamond” font since it appears nice for book titles. I set the font size to 78pts and used white font color. I then added a red color overlay over the text and set it to multiply. I did this to make it bright red because red matches the book’s horror theme. I then added a bevel and emboss effect to sharpen the text and added a drop shadow effect to attract focus onto the text since the background was light. For the punch line, I used white “Bradley Hand ITC” font set to 23pts. I also used “Century” font for the best seller quote, added a quote (“) using “Century” font set at 121pts using red color. I reduced the quotes opacity to 16% so that it can be in the background of the best seller line. I then added the author name using “Microsoft Yi Baiti” font set to 22pts, duplicated the book title, the punch line and author name and rotated them to fit on to the spine and added the publisher name using “Colonna MT” font set at 28pts.

I faced numerous challenges during the design process, the main one being that I had limited knowledge on design and Photoshop. I considered myself as untalented in graphic design. Having to learn every effect before I could use it slowed me down as well. I also struggled with different designs only to abandon them because I did not like them in the end. Nevertheless, completing the book cover brought me satisfaction; I was able turn an ordinary picture into a horrifying zombie. Furthermore, I have been able to composite four pictures, add several effects and also turn this into a horror book cover. The book cover sends out a clear horror message and I believe it would entice any horror fanatic. I started the process with very basic Photoshop skills but now I have learnt a lot in the process. I can now comfortably adjust images, composite them and add effects. However, if I had more time I would have learnt about lighting effects and gradient overlays enabling me to bring more light focus onto the zombie. Better understanding of brushes and the smudge tool would have enabled me to add realistic dead skin patches on the zombie since the skin looks very healthy on the right side of the face. The mist could also be

made more realistic. Nevertheless, I was able to create an enticing book cover fitting my original sketch within the required time.