How to Create Great Album Art with an iPhone.

Snap, Filter, Frame, & Forget ’bout it.

Shameless bragging aside, we get great positive feedback for the artwork featured by TVC. Varied styles, colours, and subjects keep the art fresh and interesting. But here’s the dirty little secret: almost all of it is done effortlessly on a smartphone. It’s true!

Getting a smartphone/tablet really opened up opportunities to capture and sketch out ideas on the spot. And that’s really what it comes down to.  You’ll be surprised what great things you can create when you always have the tools you need, right when inspiration hits. In this article we cover a few of the choice apps used to help capture and transform those ideas into really great art.

Note: this article was written with iOS devices in mind, but should apply to the android equivalents.

 

Snap.

Most smartphones these days come with great cameras, which takes care of most of your snapping needs. For example, the latest iPhones come with 8MP cameras, with some android devices clearing 12MP, and great sensors. The only real trick is to remember to take lots of pictures. You’ll never know when an otherwise bland picture could transform in to great filter art.

ProTip: When playing around with some of the filters/apps mentioned, make sure to take note of how they react to shapes, lights, and colours. Knowing what makes the apps tick will help you identify those really awesome app-friendly shots out in the real world.

Filter.

Percolator

“The secret of perfect image-processing is the skillful blending of fresh, imported pixels, precise color temperature, and the fastest numerical filtering. Percolator packs your images with well-rounded, full-bodied color — every time.”

Hands down our favourite filter. Integral to the theme of the 2011-2012 EP collection, this filter is featured in a lot of the album art. Percolator takes a loaded image and uses colour and tone averages to create a circle-mosaic of the original picture. Custom settings allow you to change the style, size, and overall blend of the circles. Check out some of the examples below:

So what happened here? Well, we fired up one of our first artsy apps, Sketchbook Pro, to make that gorgeous little finger painting. Then we saved it to the camera roll, booted up Percolator, played around with the settings, and brewed the second picture. That was it! BOOM, album cover.

Some other funky examples:

Percolator has a lot of great options worth checking out. Really, sometimes you have no idea what cool creations you’ll get unless you put the pot on the boiler.

Etchings

“Instantly create beautiful etched illustrations from any photo! Experiment with twelve stunning styles you can tweak to fit your image perfectly — it’s easy and fun to turn your photo into a unique work of art.”

Want to raise the classy-ness factor of your web art? Etchings can do that for you by rendering your stock picture in a hand-drawn “etch” style. We’ve adopted the etch filter style throughout the website, behold!

 

We know, it’s shameful. All this time you thought these were hand-drawn beauties, but alas. 

WordFoto

“You’ve probably heard the tired cliche about a picture being worth a thousand words. We’ve taken this phrase quite literally and created WordFoto, an app that turns photos and words into amazing typographic works of art.”

WordFoto brings a unique twist to the mosaic-type filter category. Enter a few words into a list within the app, and WordFoto analyzes your photo to a create a mosaic of the original using your customized words. Change the font, size, saturation, etc. to create your unique WordFoto mosaic. We used this app to create the album set list for our summer 2011 EP, “Clusterfunk”, with outstanding results:

Halftone

“Halftone turns your photos into unique, vintage comics that friends and family will love! More than a simple “photo filter” app, Halftone makes it easy to add paper styles, captions, speech balloons, graphic stamps, and fonts (including built-in comic fonts).”

Although we haven’t used this app for any official releases as of yet, the opportunities have been quite tempting. Halftone creates classic paper-printed comics out of your original picture. Choose the paper type, “printer” type, and add captions to your creations. We aren’t going to divulge our devious plan for this app just yet, but you’ll know it when you see it ;) Here’s a sample from one of our play-throughs.

The Honor Roll

Here are some other apps we’ve experimented with that may tickle your fancy.

Retromatic: “Remember those cool posters back in the 50’s? Neither do we, but Retromatic gives you the ability to create collage style images reminiscent of the groovier times. “Retromatic provides 17 original retro-style filters, 11 background images and 30 authentic retro-style ornaments. All these images aim to reflect a social atmosphere of early 20 century.”

 

ColorSplash: “Color Splash lets you quickly and easily give photos a dramatic look by converting them to black and white, while keeping your chosen details in color. This effect draws the viewers’ attention to the colored areas, creating striking images.”

 

 

Gridditor: “Gridditor shows you four filters at any given time, one in each cardinal direction with your original image at the center. The farther you go in any direction, the stronger the effect gets. By arranging the previews in a grid, you can see the effect of applying multiple filters at once letting you edit faster, and showing you creative possibilities you may not have considered otherwise.”

 

Frame.

Diptic

“Diptic lets you combine and edit photos to create awesome collages that can be shared with friends and family via email, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr or Posterous. With text captions, 14 filters, rounded borders with pretty textures and 165 customizable layouts, there are unlimited options to create unique photo collages!”

Initially created by the Flickr community, Diptic gives you a plethora of  options for framing your new artistic creations. Set the aspect ratio, choose the number and orientation of embedded frames, select and position your pics, add some final effects, and send it to the press! The framing in our albums and our business/download cards were all made with the help of Diptic!

Phoster

“With stylish templates which are already within the application, you will be able to create posters without great effort. When you get the job done of first step making posters, you can utilize various effects and decorates to complete the chic posters your own. This App is for you to create posters to promote and invite your friends at your party, concert, birthday etc.”

Okay, we’re going to take little detour from apps for album art. But this is equally important for you burgeoning artists out there. Phoster provides appealing and unique templates to create appealing posters.

Have an album release? A gig announcement? Just want to seek attention? Well enough of those boring MS Paint posters with the comic sans font (no, seriously. Enough). Use the apps mentioned above to create some art unique to your project and use Phoster to make the details of your event stand out, without making eyes bleed.

Although there’s a lot of room for improvement (for example, no undo or landscape mode), the entry price was well worth it for a tool far better than what I was already using. Even the smallest effort can help set you apart ;)

Forget ’bout it.

This really isn’t rocket science. And once you get in the habit of snapping pictures frequently, messing around with filters, and using frames effectively, you’ll find yourself making amazing art before you know it. Not to mention, it’s really fun!

So try out the apps (most have free versions available to test-drive), keep snapping, and let’s see those beauties! Post your creations in the comments, and if you find any cool apps out there, tell us about them!