Magazine Covers

Contact Sheet

I like images 1 & 2 due to the lighting elements and the available usage of the white space. Image 1 has quite bright lightening, allowing for visual interest on Lydia and the scenery behind her. Whereas image 2 has a much darker brightness but works well to emphasise the shadows of the ground and on Lydia herself which contrasts with the white sky behind her and creates a good space to add the title of the magazine but still have white space surrounding. 

 Images 3, 4 and 5 I found to be the better images out of the ones I took due to white space and visual interest. Images 3 and 4 both have the main subject towards the right hand side and further down meaning there is the possibility to have the magazine name at the top and then add left alignment to the rest of the text on the cover. Whereas image 5 has the subject closer to the middle meaning that the text can be  made to either be left or right aligned or surround Katie herself. All 3 three images also have lots of areas of visual interest meaning that white space can be use to draw the audience's attention to these areas.

Cover Drafts

Scamp Copies

Artwork Parody

As the magazine I am making is a fashion themed magazine, the first parody I chose to do was based on 'The Girl With The Pearl Earring' by Johannes Vermeer.

My sister agreed to pose for the picture in the same way the lady has done in Johannes Vermeer's painting but we took the picture against a plain background which could be later removed. My sister also dressed in a casual jumper but with a Chinese silk scarf around her head to show the fashion in the 21st Century is casual but also has an element of sophistication to it.  

After we got the picture right, I put it into Photoshop and put her against a black background. This helped to make it obvious which painting I was recreating.

The second parody I chose to make was based on 'The Whistler's Mother' by James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

My friend Emily modelled as Anna Mcneill Whistler did in the original painting and we took the picture in the Lower School reception area which is similar to the background in the painting. To make it more relevant to my magazine and more modern day Emily posed in the painting in her normal every day clothes to represent fashion in the 21st Century. 

I then put the image into photoshop to put the same curtain in my image that is in the original painting and changed the colour balance so that the image had more enhanced green tone to make it clear what painting I was recreating.

Magazine Tag Line

To make the tag lines for my magazine cover I use five different linguistic features which I could base my tag lines on. These were Alliteration, Superlative, Interrogative, Imperative and Pun. 

Cut Out Stencil Spray

This technique was inspired by Miles Donovan and for my cut out stencil spray I used a portrait image of Steve McQueen and put it into photoshop to separate it out into three tone layers; the darkest tones, medium tones and lighter tones. I then printed each part out and cut them out using a crafting knife which created the actual stencil. I then put this against a blank piece of white paper and blew black ink onto it which I then scanned into photoshop and added colour. I included prismatic, chromatic and achromatic colour tones and multiplied the layers together to make the colour merge together and form the structure of Steve McQueen's face. After this I turned the piece into a copy of a VOGUE magazine cover to represent what it could be used for and how it would look.

Magazine Research

These are images of the research I made into the type of Magazine I want to make. I went to various shops including Tesco, WHSmith and Asda, to find the ranges of magazines that are displayed and then decided which ones attracted my attention the most. These were the magazines like COMPANY and Vogue.

I bought 3 of the magazines I found and spent time looking at all their features like the typography, graphology and other contributing elements that grabbed my attention, working out what worked best in attracting the intended audience.

As well as actually finding the magazines for sale at the moment, I used Pinterest which provided a much larger range of magazine covers that I wouldn't be able to find in this area. This enabled me to decide which features of the magazines I liked the most and how I would then be able to incorporate these features in my own design.