For this assignment I decided to remake an album cover. This is for the assignment “Remix An Album Cover” in the assignment bank, which gives you free choice on however you choose to remake it. This was only a two star assignment and it was fairly simple to do. The hardest part was picking an album to remix. Since I’m old-fashioned when it comes to music, I went through every interesting album I could think of. Originally I wanted to remix Boston’s debut album, but later used it for a remix assignment instead. For this assignment, however, I pulled up and interesting album cover to turn back into a more literal representation of itself: Supertramp’s Breakfast in America. Supertramp is one of my favorite bands, and Breakfast in America is one of those albums that is referenced by anyone familiar with them. It has an iconic photograph of a waitress holding a platter with a glass and a menu, much like the Statue of Liberty, while the city of New York is shaped in the background by dishes. I looked at this album and thought, “Hey, why not make the waitress literally the Statue of Liberty?” And thus, I got to work. I’m going to outright admit I’m not good at editing photos, so instead I choose to draw this one by hand using Procreate. The layer feature was a blessing, letting me focus on the waitress before creating the background. Some reference photos to get her general shape in a light shade of blue-green that resembles oxidized copper before creating shadows with a slightly darken color. Since I was drawing it by hand, I opted for a minimalistic approach. Drawing her took the most time and afterwards I made a rough sketch of the New York skyline in the background before coloring it in. I choose a slightly lighter shade of blue to emulate the sky before using the spray-paint tool to create the yellow horizon. I even wrote the name of the band and the album name myself to complete the image. I had to practice writing it a few times before I was happy with the final result. What do you think? Instead of resembling the Statue of Liberty, she is now, quite literally, the State of Liberty. Or a Waitress of Liberty, or something like that. Basically, I broke the metaphor by creating the thing the original album cover was alluding to. I’m quite happy with the result, but have also thought about going back and putting the writing behind her. Please tell me what you think by commenting down below!

For this assignment I decided to remake an album cover. This is for the assignment “Remix An Album Cover” in the assignment bank, which gives you free choice on however you choose to remake it. This was only a two star assignment and it was fairly simple to do. The hardest part was picking an album to remix. Since I’m old-fashioned when it comes to music, I went through every interesting album I could think of. Originally I wanted to remix Boston’s debut album, but later used it for a remix assignment instead. For this assignment, however, I pulled up and interesting album cover to turn back into a more literal representation of itself: Supertramp’s Breakfast in America. Supertramp is one of my favorite bands, and Breakfast in America is one of those albums that is referenced by anyone familiar with them. It has an iconic photograph of a waitress holding a platter with a glass and a menu, much like the Statue of Liberty, while the city of New York is shaped in the background by dishes. I looked at this album and thought, “Hey, why not make the waitress literally the Statue of Liberty?” And thus, I got to work. I’m going to outright admit I’m not good at editing photos, so instead I choose to draw this one by hand using Procreate. The layer feature was a blessing, letting me focus on the waitress before creating the background. Some reference photos to get her general shape in a light shade of blue-green that resembles oxidized copper before creating shadows with a slightly darken color. Since I was drawing it by hand, I opted for a minimalistic approach. Drawing her took the most time and afterwards I made a rough sketch of the New York skyline in the background before coloring it in. I choose a slightly lighter shade of blue to emulate the sky before using the spray-paint tool to create the yellow horizon. I even wrote the name of the band and the album name myself to complete the image. I had to practice writing it a few times before I was happy with the final result. What do you think? Instead of resembling the Statue of Liberty, she is now, quite literally, the State of Liberty. Or a Waitress of Liberty, or something like that. Basically, I broke the metaphor by creating the thing the original album cover was alluding to. I’m quite happy with the result, but have also thought about going back and putting the writing behind her. Please tell me what you think by commenting down below!

For this next assignment this week, I decided to create a children’s book cover for the “Mashedup Children’s Book” assignment. Lately I have been excited with the news of there being a Season Two of the Amazon Prime Show Good Omens, so I wanted to create a mash-up book cover that reveals some of the plot without fully giving it away. For anyone not familiar with it, Good Omens (1990) was written by Neil Gaimen (of Sandman fame) and Terry Prachett (of Discworld fame). They are two of the greatest British authors in recent times, and Good Omens has had a devoted cult following since its release in 1990. Amazon Prime adapted the book into a six-episode show in 2018, starring Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale and David Tennant as the demon Crowley. The show is a marvelous adaptation of the book, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a platonic love story between former enemies, which also has some very dry comic bits in-between. The book does this more than the show, and some parts will have you doubled over laughing as how off-track-without-actually-getting-off-track it is at times. 10/10, glowing recommendation from me! Anyways, I started by looking around for some Good Omens fanart. There’s quite a bit, since the book came out in the 1990s. However, I found a wonderful piece by Chocodile on Twitter that portrays Crowley driving his 1933 (in the show; it’s a 1926 in the book) Bentley as it’s on fire. This is something that occurred in both the book and show, and I immediately knew the title I wanted to go with. First off, I do not own this fanart! Chocodile is the artist, and I only repurposed it for this project! The original Tweet that contains the art can be found below! To make the book cover, I downloaded the image then used Pixlr to create a canvas that was approximately the size of a book cover. I wanted to keep the yellow background, because I liked the way it looked and felt it really complimented the children’s book aesthetic. I messed around with shading a bit before deciding it looks better as the original. From there I generated the title “A Demon’s Guide to Stopping the Apocalypse” by Neil Gaimen and Terry Prachett. I personally like to image there’s a sequel out in the world somewhere, titled “An Angel’s Guide to Stopping the Apocalypse” or something like that. This one is from Crowley’s perspective, so that one could be from Aziraphale’s. There could actually be an entire series! “A Witch’s Guide…,” “A Witch Hunter’s Guide…,” “The Antichrist’s Guide…,” etc., etc.! These are all references to the book/show, by the way, so I apologize to anyone unfamiliar with it. Basically it’s a motley crew consisting of an angel, a demon, the antichrist, three human children, a witch, a witch hunter, a former witch hunter, and a medium who team up to stop the apocalypse. It’s quite fun(ny) actually! Here’s the final product! Please let me know what you think in a comment down below!

For my first assignment this week, I decided to complete the “Buffalax!” assignment in the DS106 Assignment Bank. This assignments calls you you to take a video in a language other than English and give it English captions. I knew from the start I wanted to used the music video for Nena’s “99 Luftballons” since it one of my favorite non-English songs. “99 Luftballons” is a song from 1983 that became a hit in the United States. It actually peaked #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart in 1984, which I know from listening to old reruns of American Top 40 on the radio. I’ve known this song for years and consider it to be one of my favorite ones from the 1980s. There’s an English version too, “99 Red Balloons,” but I personally don’t think it’s as good. Plus the English version isn’t a direct translation of the German version. “99 Luftballons” is an antiwar song based on events during the Cold War. The gist of the song is someone released ninety-nine balloons into the air and a missile target defense system mistook them for enemy missiles and fired on them, destroying the country in the process. It’s a very dark song once you know the meaning behind it, but it’s still a favorite of mine. For this assignment, I choose to translate the German lyrics into English using Google Translate. After downloading the original German music video from YouTube, I then captioned the video with the translated lyrics. This was actually a bit harder than I originally thought it would be because I’m not fluent in German. I had to listen to the song over and over again to understand the German words enough to put certain translated lyrics in. On the plus side, I learned some German while doing this assignment! I can probably sing it in German now, which makes me happy! The final product is posted on Vimeo since the YouTube copyright police shut me down before I even got done uploading the video. Thankfully Vimeo is a bit more lenient. Please check it out, and let me know what you think down below!

For this next assignment this week, I decided to create a children’s book cover for the “Mashedup Children’s Book” assignment. Lately I have been excited with the news of there being a Season Two of the Amazon Prime Show Good Omens, so I wanted to create a mash-up book cover that reveals some of the plot without fully giving it away. For anyone not familiar with it, Good Omens (1990) was written by Neil Gaimen (of Sandman fame) and Terry Prachett (of Discworld fame). They are two of the greatest British authors in recent times, and Good Omens has had a devoted cult following since its release in 1990. Amazon Prime adapted the book into a six-episode show in 2018, starring Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale and David Tennant as the demon Crowley. The show is a marvelous adaptation of the book, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a platonic love story between former enemies, which also has some very dry comic bits in-between. The book does this more than the show, and some parts will have you doubled over laughing as how off-track-without-actually-getting-off-track it is at times. 10/10, glowing recommendation from me! Anyways, I started by looking around for some Good Omens fanart. There’s quite a bit, since the book came out in the 1990s. However, I found a wonderful piece by Chocodile on Twitter that portrays Crowley driving his 1933 (in the show; it’s a 1926 in the book) Bentley as it’s on fire. This is something that occurred in both the book and show, and I immediately knew the title I wanted to go with. First off, I do not own this fanart! Chocodile is the artist, and I only repurposed it for this project! The original Tweet that contains the art can be found below! To make the book cover, I downloaded the image then used Pixlr to create a canvas that was approximately the size of a book cover. I wanted to keep the yellow background, because I liked the way it looked and felt it really complimented the children’s book aesthetic. I messed around with shading a bit before deciding it looks better as the original. From there I generated the title “A Demon’s Guide to Stopping the Apocalypse” by Neil Gaimen and Terry Prachett. I personally like to image there’s a sequel out in the world somewhere, titled “An Angel’s Guide to Stopping the Apocalypse” or something like that. This one is from Crowley’s perspective, so that one could be from Aziraphale’s. There could actually be an entire series! “A Witch’s Guide…,” “A Witch Hunter’s Guide…,” “The Antichrist’s Guide…,” etc., etc.! These are all references to the book/show, by the way, so I apologize to anyone unfamiliar with it. Basically it’s a motley crew consisting of an angel, a demon, the antichrist, three human children, a witch, a witch hunter, a former witch hunter, and a medium who team up to stop the apocalypse. It’s quite fun(ny) actually! Here’s the final product! Please let me know what you think in a comment down below!

For my first assignment this week, I decided to complete the “Buffalax!” assignment in the DS106 Assignment Bank. This assignments calls you you to take a video in a language other than English and give it English captions. I knew from the start I wanted to used the music video for Nena’s “99 Luftballons” since it one of my favorite non-English songs. “99 Luftballons” is a song from 1983 that became a hit in the United States. It actually peaked #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart in 1984, which I know from listening to old reruns of American Top 40 on the radio. I’ve known this song for years and consider it to be one of my favorite ones from the 1980s. There’s an English version too, “99 Red Balloons,” but I personally don’t think it’s as good. Plus the English version isn’t a direct translation of the German version. “99 Luftballons” is an antiwar song based on events during the Cold War. The gist of the song is someone released ninety-nine balloons into the air and a missile target defense system mistook them for enemy missiles and fired on them, destroying the country in the process. It’s a very dark song once you know the meaning behind it, but it’s still a favorite of mine. For this assignment, I choose to translate the German lyrics into English using Google Translate. After downloading the original German music video from YouTube, I then captioned the video with the translated lyrics. This was actually a bit harder than I originally thought it would be because I’m not fluent in German. I had to listen to the song over and over again to understand the German words enough to put certain translated lyrics in. On the plus side, I learned some German while doing this assignment! I can probably sing it in German now, which makes me happy! The final product is posted on Vimeo since the YouTube copyright police shut me down before I even got done uploading the video. Thankfully Vimeo is a bit more lenient. Please check it out, and let me know what you think down below!