Owl CIty-Assignment for my art class

     Among different courses I take in this school, art class, which is taught by Mr. Ahn (Sangjun Ahn) is definitely one of the most awaited classes. In previous semester, we learned some basic Photoshop skills that we can utilize for editing our pictures. Students acquired how to use several Photoshop features by actually applying them to photos we took individually. Although our art class can be seen as somewhat floopy and loose without any feelings of burden, it is really wasting our time if we do not pay attention or just do other things by laptop in the class.

     During this 2nd semester, Mr. Ahn gave us two assignments; the first one was to create parody piece on Rene Magritte’s ‘The Human Condition’ (La Condition Humaine) and the second one, whose deadline was actually yesterday, was to create an album cover of a music artist. So…when Mr. Ahn announced this in the class, I started to think…’whose album cover should I make?? MIKA, Simple Plan, Owl City…all my favourite artists or groups slided through my brain. Hmm…Who should I choose??? During this moment, I was listening to music in my iPhone MP3’s ‘Pop’ list. Suddenly, one of my favorite music, Owl City’s ‘Hot Air Balloon’ turned on, and I was decided. I decided to make an album cover of Owl City, one of my favourite American Pop artists.

     As we all know, an album cover of artists should portray them inside, showing some characteristics of their music. So, what about Owl City? One of the biggest characteristics of his songs is his unique voice and poetic lyrics. His voice is quite soft, and it is well harmonized with such a wonderful lyrics. For example, in the song ‘Hot Air Balloon’ there is a part where it says ‘We wrote a prelude to our own fairy tale/ and bout a parachute/ at a church rummage sale/ and with a mean sewing machine and miles of thread/ we sewed the day above L.A. in navy and red’. Actually, all other songs of Owl City have just these kinds of great lyrics. One should definitely listen to them since it’s a bit indescribable. Also, in most songs, Owl City uses autotune, which is commonly used to give a special vocal effect. Especially in K-POPs, a lot of artists use autotune to snap their voice in the middle of the song; it is quite annoying when autotunes are used too much for this purpose. However, Owl City’s music is completely different. He uses autotune in a way that does not disturb the flow of his voice. Again, it is harmonized well with his own voice, creating a sentimental or ‘dreamlike’ effect. So you can basically get how Owl City’s music are like…but don’t forget to listen to them!

     In order to convey these styles of Owl City, I started to wonder. First, I choosed to use a photo of sky with some clouds as a background image. I actually took some new pictures, but one that I found most adequate was one that I took during last summer vacation. I cut my photos to make it into a square shape and changed its overall tone by using basic features of Photoshop. Then, as you can see from my piece, I inserted a word ‘OWL CITY’. This was actually where I spent most of the time with. Especially, I was struggling with which font to use, but no single fonts in Photoshop pleased me, so I decided to download some nice fonts from internet sites. (If you go to some sites such as www.fontspace.com, you can find tons of fabulous fonts!). After finishing my work with letters, I wanted to decorate my pictures with airplanes (specifically paper airplanes haha), so guess what I’ve done! I’ve just put three paper-airplanes-looking shape. Then, I decorated my cover with a star-shaped brush tools by dotting them on the piece. I guess this assignment is the best among what I’ve done during a year of my art class. How do you think? Well, I am quite satisfied about having completed my album cover successfully!