Irish Web Design Services: http://wildappeal.com

Irish Web Design Services:  http://wildappeal.com

Musicophilia Chimera

In this project I am to design a book cover for Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia. My design of the book must include a Chimera. The Chimera must include type and musical symbols.

Final Piece

This is the one ill be putting through as my finished piece for the project. Simplicity is the concept here, less is more I thought which is why i created this sphere with a with a brain inside and the circle of fifths overleyed on it. I'm really happy with the way this cover turned out. The Heading I made after watching this tutorial: http://abduzeedo.com/easy-casino-style-sign-photoshop on abduzeedo. It ticks all the required box I decided were necessary: simple, slick, contained, sophisticated, modern and maybe slightly more interesting than other of his covers.



Process

Sphere Process

This is the how I made the sphere surrounding the brain. Step 1: create a new psd document, make it 4x4 inces and 300 resolution, make the background black, then choose filter/render/lens flare/ 105mm. Step 2:Next choose filter/distort/polar coordinants/ polar to rectanglular. Step 3: Image rotation-180. Step 4: filter/ distort/ polar coordinants/ Rectangular to polar. Step 5: Make a cirle selection/new layer/filter/render/clouds. Step 6: filter/distort/twist. Step 7: filter/distort spherize-100%. Step 8: Apply the filters in step 6 and 7 to first layer/ invert selection and cut.


Type Process

Here is a step by step process of my Type. All effects were applied in Photoshop and an image of a light buld was used and duplicated with various effects.








Background Image Process

This is the image I use to create the textured background. I created this image for a previous project for Ideas Geneeration class. This image was created by combining felt of a christmass sock, the concrete exterior of my house and scanned in paint splashes mix together with various blend modes and effects in Photoshop.















First Chimera Book Cover Idea

This was the first cover I designed. The concept for this came from the story of the man who gets struck by lightening (conveyed by the sound wave and the colour of the character) and the storys of sinesthesia (conveyed by the colour streaming from the chimera's mind). It's ok (ish) in my opinion. It is a bit too loud, uncoordinated, sci fi and unsophisticated as a whole, which is why I was not too happy with it. I spent way too much time designing this cover, it just never seemed to work but I do like the individual elements on their own.





Oliver Sacks Other Book Covers

All of his other books share similar qualities, simple, clean, sophisticated (most of the time). Something to keep i mind when design my cover. They seemed to be for the intelligentsia of society, so i'll try keep the loud and flashy to a minimum.



Inspiring and Relative Image Research

I used this image in one of my early protoypes

same as this one

Intersting image, could definitely do something like this.

I could use this idea using musical related words as well as musical symbols.

Cool image, could use for a mouth or other effects.

I love this image, interesting looking lye with a face, I could use this idea with another image, also this reminds me that I don't have to create a living character chimera I could also design an inanimate chimera.

This could be a useful concept when designing my chimera.

Really cool abstract image, the colours really work in this and as well as relating to the concept of the book.

Even though this has a slap dash look to it it still works quite well.



Sketchs

Research
The book Musicophilia is a Oliver Sacks's psychological exploration of the effects of music on the human mind. Oliver talks about his own personal experience with music as a Neuro Psychologist, his patients experiences and tons of research he's accumulated over his career.

Iv'e only read a few small stories from the book its self as well as overviews and reviews and I have found them to be facinating, fun and full of quirky human emotion.

Book Covers

These are the only two covers I found of Musicaphilia, they are both fairly conservative and boring in my opinion considering the colourful and interesting stories inside.

Chimera

My Chimera so far

My Chimera without background or effects.

 

 My Chimera with with background and lighting effects.

Chimera Research

The Chimera or Chimaera (Greek: Χίμαιρα, Khimaira, from χίμαρος, khimaros, "she-goat") was, according to Greek mythology, a monstrous fire-breathing female creature of Lycia in Asia Minor, composed of the parts of multiple animals: upon the body of a lioness with a tail that ended in a snake's head, the head of a goat arose on her back at the center of her spine. The Chimera was one of the offspring of Typhon and Echidna and a sibling of such monsters as Cerberus and the Lernaean Hydra. The term chimera has also come to mean, more generally, an impossible or foolish fantasy, hard to believe.




Genetic Chimera
A chimera is an animal that has two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells that originated in different zygotes involved with sexual reproduction; if the different cells emerged from the same zygote, it is called a mosaicism.

One of the first Human/Animal Chimera.  A mouse splilced with the genes that controls the shape of the human ear.


Platypus

 The Platypus was originally thought to be a joke to fool zoologitsts when it first turned up in a british museam.  In retrospect its easy to see how they came to such a conclusion; with the bill of a duck, body of an otter and tail of a beaver that is also a an egg laying marsupial.


Transformers 
Resisting the urge to focus on the traditional mythological concepts of a Chimera I immediately thought of my childhood obsession TRANSFORMERS!  A transformer is a typical chimera in every sense; Its part robot, part vehicle, part weapon, part machine and part organism.

Classic Transformers

My favorite transformer Soundwave: part robot and ......part tape recorder..? (the 80s)

 Unicron: from the transformer movie, part transformer, part planet, part Orson Wells

Transforer Soundwave from the latest movie

  

Alternative Transformer Concepts

Transdyson

Photoshoped Transformer Car

Mobile Phone Transformer

USB Transformer

Digitaly Designed Transformer Chimeras

 This chimera appears to have been created from various parts of transformers from the movie with a face and background photoshope in.

This is something along the lines I am thinkin of creating by using the contents of my bag.

Again this is like someting I would like to emulatte but itsead of cuting croping and pasting (which is what seems to have mainly been done here) I'll create numerous layer masks and copy and "paste into" a selected area which I will draw with the polygonal lasso tool probably over an existing transformer/robert design or from my own drawing.


 Bag Contents

 

 My Contents: Plastic cutlery, 3 Pencils, 6 coloured ice popsticks, wallet, chain, keys, phone, 2 siccors, 1 marker, 3 pencil sharpeners, 1 sd card, 2 pens, pack of scalpel blades, pack of cards, money, notebook, rubber, tipex pen, filling folder, laptop.

Process

 I drew this image with pencil in my sketchbook to use a base structure to build my chimera around (the  contrast here is greatly increased).

Items used.

I decided to use mainly my phone and other metaclic objects that I had in my bag like my pencil sharpener, wallet buttons and coins which I then adjusted in photoshop to get the right colour and tones and then placed them into layer masks using the paste into option and I painted in shadows to make it look more realistic.