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Underground > Creation >

Mixtape Art (PICS)

10:38 / 18.04.05

The front cover, back cover, and label I made for my barbelith mixtape.

Another label.

Two Mixes for my girlfriend.

One for her daughter.

12:07 / 18.04.05

fucking love it.. wanna start a design company?

All Acting Regiment

12:58 / 18.04.05

Top- very Invisibles, very "becoming the future." Might have something of mine own to dig out.

13:04 / 18.04.05

yup..me too

15:52 / 18.04.05

the pixelation and jpeg-artifacts and non-anti-aliasing makes me shudder.... but the composition is very nice. you've a got a knack for this sort of thing, but you should read up on the technical bits.

17:14 / 18.04.05

nice. fwiw, here's a cover for a mefi-swap i did: [edit] oh! i just realised that this was a specific barbelith swap, rather than any old swap. so i've zapped my irrelevant image. sorry, i'm new here...

20:23 / 18.04.05

AC - d'worry about relevance. If you've got album art, post it.

TeN - this is what's great about barbelith. Someone here knows about everything. Please define/explain how to avoid: pixelation, jpeg-artifacts and non-anti-aliasing.

(In small syllables, please - I have a copy of Photoshop and no manual or idea what or where anything is)

20:43 / 18.04.05

well it depends on how you went about making these I suppose. first off, try using larger images instead of blowing up smaller ones. be more careful and precise when trimming around the edges of your images. there's lots of other things you can do, but I'm not going to go in to detail here, you can find tutorials on all that online.

then again, these are just mixtape covers, they're not intended to be professional... for what they are, I like them.

00:52 / 21.04.05

if you're starting with small images there's not a lot you can do except blur the result - the idea being that it's better to be a bit fuzzy that have jaggy edges to pixels.

but really, as [oh, i should have made a note of who i was replying to] says, this is a mix tape, so why not go with the big pixels and jaggy edges and make it part of the design (to be honest, that's what i assumed was happening with the pictures posted).

you can do cute things by pushing the limits. for example, i had a self portrait i quite liked that was made by taking a standard head shot and compressing it with jpeg until nearly all detail was lost. the result was a kind of mosaic. it looked cool.

another related example. i'm stuck in s america and it's difficult to get good colour printing. so my recent work (i make images with computers in my free time) are black and white. that way i can print them out with a laser printer. turning limitations into sources of ideas is just part of art, right?

14:45 / 25.04.05

I've been designing a bunch of covers to go with all the CDs I've been compiling. Considering I only had AppleWorks and a bunch of clip-art photos to work with, I don't think I did too badly...

I added to my choice of images by taking some screengrabs of the iTunes visualisations, as well, and they came up pretty nice, I think.

Though none of them are terribly interesting...

21:53 / 25.04.05

Not mixtapes, but album covers for a "UK Rhyme 2005" box set I put together for my sister:

Arular

Run the Road

Awfully Deep

They were in DVD cases, hence the odd format.

22:18 / 25.04.05

Iconoplast, I think those are absolutely ace.

23:26 / 25.04.05

lentil, i'm loving that first one

11:22 / 26.04.05

Cheers TeN. By the way, I've noticed that iconoplast's pieces look way better if you do right click>image>properties and paste the link into the browser - perhaps the pixelisation just comes from the fact that they've been resized to fit the board?

Suedey! SHOT FOR MEAT!

12:47 / 26.04.05

Shit lentil, I'm loving that M.I.A. one. The others, too. But that one. That one I love. I like how it hits a half way point between yr art and her vibrant music/art/persona.

You've reminded me I wanted to draw her now as well, but I don't want to anymore because it'll look silly.

You people, and all this effort you put in to making pretty things for people! People are lucky if I manage to write the tracks down. In biro.

14:59 / 26.04.05

Cool... actually I've put the image from the MIA one in my "I am trying to be a professional" portfolio and it has gone down very well with people who've seen it. I'm yet to bag a commission in that style but your comments are very encouaging.

Suedey, I think you should draw her, she's definitely the kind of artist who deserves to inspire lots of fan art and have her name written on pencil cases.

paranoidwriter waves hello

15:14 / 03.05.05

lentil, I second that. I can't stop listening to "$10" at the moment.

Erm.... By the way, do any of you graphic designers out there fancy doing me (or rather a friend of mine) a favour? I have in my possession an image and some text, which need to be put together into a CD cover for a demo. Only problem is: we need it done soon, my computer is a weakling, and it's going to take me bloody ages to learn Photoshop/Illustrator/etc.

All it needs is some basic layout, etc, and shouldn't take any of you pro's too long....

However, we're completely skint.... So we'll understand if you tell us where to stick it.

17:43 / 03.05.05

paranoidwriter: I've got some time on my hands, send it to me and i'll see what i can do.

lentil: ahhh, i see. well then, iconoplast, I suppose my critiques were a bit too harsh after all. at their proper size, those look for the most part just fine.

paranoidwriter waves hello

18:12 / 03.05.05

Thanks for the offer TeN, much appreciated. But I think another member is going have a bash at it for me (I really don't know whether I should reveal who, yet, as I don't want to put them under any further pressure).

19:57 / 04.05.05

These are a few I've made over the past two years:

"A B-Movie Trilogy" (disc 1, 2, 3)
Handmade cardstock package, wrapped in aluminum foil. The art is on inkjetted transparencies that float just off the surface of the foil.

"City Magic"
Handmade cardstock case wrapped in generic photo paper.

"Our Magnificent Flying Machine"
This is a burgopak dvd case painted in acrylic. The floating collage was cut from magazines and is mounted on heavy watercolour paper. The tracklist is inkjetted onto a thin, leaf-strewn paper.

There are more mixes by me here: Art of the Mix

21:40 / 04.05.05

damn kowalski! those are siiiiick!
now i'm feeling all inspired and stuff

(nice taste in music too, i might add)

14:47 / 06.05.05

Those links aren't working for me, kowalski, but I really like what you've posted. Particularly Our Magnificent Flying Machine - it's like "Fuck, imagine receiving that!". Using collage and textures on this kind of thing makes so much sense, reinforcing the fact that it's a one-off, a specific gift to another person.

00:46 / 07.05.05

Hey Lentil, those links should be working again now, artofthemix.org just spent much of the day offline for some reason.

I can't wait to finish another mix so that I can figure out how to package it : )

21:55 / 29.07.05

this week I made a 4 disc mixtape for my friend who wanted to be introduced to hip-hop (he listens to mostly indie/arty stuff). the packaging I decided to make on a whim during a blackout when I had nothing else to do (most of this was done by candle light).

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silly me - I cut the carboard too early and it wound up being too short. oh well.

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it looks alot better in real life, I swear

21:34 / 04.08.05

hip hop for haters, is great.

gotta love that hand drawn lettering.

and a toronto pic, cool!

00:48 / 05.08.05

thanks

I love doing hand drawn lettering. I want to get alot better at it, so that I can do really interesting, ornate stuff. unfortunetly, my handwritting sucks, and my lettering seems to follow in its footsteps.