Front Cover Backgrounds (+ possible new name)

 With a few of my pictures I discovered that the background would be unsuitable for writing on. So I cut out the person I had used and put them onto a white background (image right). But there was a flaw with this idea. Because my background was now completely white, it didn't look like a front cover for a music magazine. I liked some of these pictures I had, so I researched into some magazine front covers that didn't have a natural background I started with Kerrang!, for I had noticed in the past that a lot of the images they used for their front covers were didn't have a natural background, instead using either a dark or whitish background.

 With a lot of the Kerrang! front covers very few of them have a natural background, and a lot have a black background, such as this one. I tried doing this to my front cover, but the result still didn't look that good. I then observed that in all Kerrang! covers a vast amount of space is taken up by other images and text. I considered trying this, but I then thought this could take a long time, so I decided to look at some other covers before trying this idea. Another flaw with this idea is that my magazine isn't going to be based entirely around rock and heavy metal music, so I decided to scrap this idea

  I noticed the same thing with both of these NME none-natural background covers - they were both filled to the brim with text.

Again, before trying out his idea, I wanted to try a quicker solution. To make the picture have a more natural looking background, I need to make some areas appear darkened and shadowed. I attempted this using to soft brush on the white background, varying the opacity of the brush in order to make it look more natural. I also tried playing around with the modes, such as soft light and vivid light.

As another short term solution, I decided to play around with the effects of the background (such as the black and white effect) and added a few things that I may be considering using for the final front cover to fill up empty space. I have also experimented with the titles, for at times I felt that the title: Vantage, was taking up too much space. Thus I decided I would try a shorter word so I could have more on the front cover. The idea came to me as I was looking at some Q magazine covers, for I liked the look of them as well as the house style: Q stands out from other music magazines as no other magazine has a single letter in the title. I felt I would be copying Q if I attempted a single letter on my magazine cover, so I looked to NME. The masthead looked quite good and the full title, New Musical Express, was quite a good name for a music magazine. So I thought of a 3 letter masthead: M.I.A The actually meaning of this is a military term, Missing In Action, but I changed the 'Missing' to 'Music' and I then had a second title. This is not necessarily the title I am using for my final piece, as it may turn out that Vantage does look better on the front cover.