Tips and tools for musicians

Album Art

One challenge of the DIY musician is creating album art. Unless you're graphic designer or other type of visual artist, making album art is one of those necessary evils we all have to deal with. You could wait for that million dollar record deal and let the label take care of all that, or you could do it yourself. Here's some tips on that:

• Get public domain images from the web. Wikipedia has a great list of websites that are repositories for images that can be used for personal AND COMMERCIAL purposes. Here's that page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources

• Take your own pictures. Get your camera or borrow one from a friend and get off your lazy ass. Take high res pictures of your pretty face, your cool guitar, tress, flowers, of anything, take lots and lots of pictures. It costs you nothing but time.

• Tweak your public domain pictures and the photos you took with Picasa. Picasa is a superb photo editing program provided for free by Google. It allows you to make fast changes to pictures. I recommend cropping, straightening and definitely look into focal blur and focal black and white. Picasa can be downloaded here: http://picasa.google.com/
  

• Get Photoshop. If you can't afford it, or aren't morally flexible enough to 'borrow' it, get GIMP. GIMP is a FREE photoshop-like program. It may not be as good as Photoshop but it does enough for what we need to do here. Take the photos you edited with Picasa and layer them on top of one another. Mess with how the photos sit on top of one another. Add your clever band name here too, and your songs titles.
  

Well, that's all I got for now. Add your own tips and image editing glory stories in the comments below.

posted by Derrik @ 1:42 PM