#made a cool violet themed background to might edit it and use it for my phone hmmm

[bumpscosity]

Desperately trying to pin down all my pkmn sv voiceclaims before the animes dub cast is released

[vis3001]

HAMTASIA

Following my theme of wanting to create something that the animal themselves could interact with and hopefully enjoy, I took inspiration from Plantasia and the fact it was made ‘for plants... and the people who love them’ and came up with the idea of creating a version for hamsters.

Using a free PSD vinyl mockup for the template, I added the original Plantasia cover in to photoshop and manipulated it to create my own design. I wanted to make my cover seem as legitimate as I could and so I did my best to change as few elements as possible in order to transform it. Starting out with the lettering, I turned to Reddit to help me identify the font used for Plantasia (it goes by several names but Eightball is most common) which I downloaded and used in my own work. I took care to give it the same black shadow that the original lettering has using a technique that I learned whilst making 60′s inspired posters for my friends bands prior to starting University, I love the result this gives as it’s very reminiscent of retro screen printing. I then changed ‘Mother Earth’s’, which is the name of a store that distributed the original record, to ‘Jerry Good’s’. This is a brand name I came up with myself inspired by my own pet (and the fact he’s a good hamster) and edited the orange writing to read ‘warm earth music for hamsters... and the people who love them’

Moving on the the imagery, I started off by copying the orange lines that span across the cover so that I could erase things behind them without loosing them. After I completed this, I observed how the two people on the cover are holding a plant and came to the conclusion that it made sense for them to be holding a hamster as that’s something that people generally do with them anyway and so I erased the plant drawing and drew a tiny hamster within the peoples hands using the brush tool on Photoshop. Drawing this hamster was much more difficult than any of the ones from my self initiated task, I think this might be in large part due to how small it is and the fact that I used a computer mouse to complete it rather than a more traditional drawing apparatus which would have given me more control over the lines I was creating. Despite this, the one upside to drawing digitally in this way is that you can undo and redo it as many times as you like without affecting the rest of the image with smudges or rubber marks.

After this, I was a bit stumped as to what to fill the rest of the space with and so I decided to add one of the hamsters from my drawing exercise to see how it looked. I ended up being really pleased with the results as I found them to be reminiscent of the hand drawn impression given by the plant on the original cover.

Having completed the cover, I decided to add some extra detail and create the impression of a vinyl with a label coming out of the sleeve as this is another feature that the PSD mockup I was using offered and I wanted to make use of it. I took a look at how the original Plantasia vinyl looked and designed mine similarly but with a hamster related twist. You cant actually see a lot of writing on the disks but they have the track listing for each side of the album along with information about the record company on them. Although not entirely readable in my own design either, I changed names of songs from the original album to be hamster related such as ‘Symphony for a Spider Plant’ becoming ‘Symphony for a Syrian’ and ‘Ode to an African Violet’ becoming ‘Ode to a Robrovoski Ham’

I really struggled with changing my ‘Hamtasia’ lettering from green to white to fit the green background on the label, fortunately for myself, you cant see the first three letters once the vinyl is behind the sleeve and so I cheated a bit with this element and just used an image I found online of the Plantasia lettering but in white. You can also see here where I have made quite a poor job of using the magic wand tool to separate this lettering from the background of the image I took it from, however, it’s not nearly as noticeable in the final design as it is up close due to the fact that it appears much smaller and is also not the main focus of the whole image. I also ran into some trouble getting the layout and perspectives right but again, due to the fact that it’s not massively noticeable nor the focal point of the final product, I came to the conclusion that the design did it’s job in giving the illusion of a vinyl label and stopped working on it as I didn’t want to get caught up with it when I could be working on progressing other parts of my project.

Finally, I experimented with how a subtle change of background color makes the album and vinyl look, normally they are presented on a white background but I thought it would be nice to add a light green one as a small ode to Plantasia’s limited edition green vinyl. The contrast between the pale green and white makes the cover stand out far more, I also think it helps the dark green label look a little more subdued which works in my favor in terms of hiding the messier aspects of my design.

Overall I’m absolutely thrilled by how this turned out. I personally find it to be highly comedic and I had a lot of fun making it. Following on from this, I think it would be cool if I could actually create music to go along with this cover and support my project. If I could achieve this, I would be able to play it to my hamster and see how he reacts which directly links to my aim of creating art for animals.