Ancillary Task Practice - Album Cover/Digipak

In preparation for my ancillary task of creating a digipak for the music video, I have created two different album covers as practice. 

Swimming Pools - Kendrick Lamar

This is an album cover I created for the song Swimming Pools. I found a stock image of Compton, Kendrick Lamar's hometown. This idea of loyalty to where you are from is a strong convention within rap and this is something I had in mind with the creation of the of this cover. I wanted to make the city look like a prosperous place to live and as such I created two layers of the stock image and applied a soft light layer setting to the top layer and blurred the bottom layer. I thought that this would make the lights look brighter. I also slightly moved the bottom layer to create a feeling of distortion in order to be congruent with the themes of the song. To further the feeling of distortion I also added noise to the image. I think this also had the inadvertent effect of making the city's lights look brighter and busier so this is a skill that I learnt in the creation of this cover. One thing I would look to improve for this is my font choice for the text 'Swimming Pools'. I think it contrasts and compliments 'Kendrick Lamar' well but I think there is something about it which looks unpolished that I would like to improve. Therefore when creating my final ancillary task I will take extra care with my font. However I do think that the text placement on this cover is something that I did well as it shows off the interesting parts of the image, such as the skyscrapers, whilst clearly communicating the text.   

U - Kendrick Lamar

This is another album cover I created, this time for the song 'U' by Kendrick Lamar again. I took the image for this cover myself and this is good practice for the final ancillary task as it avoids copyright issues. I wanted to created a grimey kind of feel for this cover, reflecting the topic of the song. Therefore I desaturated the image and created a red glow on the hand print to create the look of blood on the hands. I used a paintbrush and reduced the opacity so it blended into the image and wasn't an abrupt change to colour. Similarly to the other album cover, I feel that my font choice is something I can improve on. I think the 'U' is something a little hard to read and I am unsure if the 'Kendrick Lamar' text is place well. My thinking was to integrate it with the gaps in the bricks but I don't think it worked as well as I wanted.