This is pretty much done

The DVD sleeve is about done

After slaving away at books and scouring the internet for the perfect pictures and watching multiple tutorials, the artwork is finished. Barr a few logos that need to be placed. So here is a comprehensive run down of what I did.

Credits and screen shots

The first thing I did was a bit of a short cut as I really didn't have time to type it all out myself. I cut the credits from the bottom of the DVD case of the shadow figures and pasted it at the bottom of the case. The images I did a little differently. On my very first update, I already had these in place and I did this by dragging the files in from a folder and resizing them against a black square. At the time, I did not know I could manipulate the shape and change the layer from a smart object. I kept the images in the same place as the concept as the plan was to have an image to the right of the bottom one and left of the top one. This has changed slightly and will detailed below shortly.

Rear character

The rear character was a little tricky for what I wanted to do and I followed a tutorial for the most part. The tutorial I followed is listed below but I will list exactly what I did.

The first thing I did was use the quick selection tool to select the character. I was being very careful to select all of the character except for his claws as I did not need those. I then duplicated the selection to a new layer, called it effect, added another new layer and placed it in between the previous layers and painted it white with the paint bucket tool.

I duplicated the effect layer and called it jackman, went back to the effect layer and selected liquify from the filters menu. In the liquify menu, I changed the brush width to 350 pixels initially and changed the brush density and pressure to 100. I then proceeded to stretch the image over to the right while constantly changing brush size to get the effect I wanted. Something similar to the tutorial, but not quite the same.

At this stage I selected the effect layer, created a mask and painted it black. I then selected the jackman layer and created a mask for that layer. From here, I made sure the mask was selected, I then selected the brush tool and changed it to a different tip to one that I downloaded. From here, I somewhat knew what to do and started to click different areas of the picture with different sized brushes and different angles so it didn't look like a pattern, like the video demonstrated.

After I was done making the white particle effect appear, I then selected the black mask on the effect layer and repeated the same process. To finish the image off, I added some CG fireballs and changed the opacity so the characters hands could be seen as if they were being conjured from his hands. This was the finished result:

The finished character which I am VERY happy with

There would have been screen shots as I was going along, but I got carried away with the tutorial and completed the image without taking shots in stages.

Adding text and that's pretty much it

The original plan was not to have text, but two pictures instead. It may have looked good in theory but looking at actual DVD cases, I decided against it as the text was a nice way to draw the viewers attention to the plot line and too many pictures could ruin the case. I made up a description but was very careful in the font used. I chose Arial Regular as this font is widely used among computers and would prove very easy to read to most viewers.

I chose to include a tag line as most movies seem to have a tag line which tries to hook the person viewing the DVD to buy it. So I used the same font as the title but made it smaller so it could fit on one line. I then used the same font with a slightly smaller size and placed this on the spine of the DVD ensuring there was even space from the edges and leaving enough space for logos at the top and bottom.

The last bit of text I added was at the last minute. I was left with some black space at the top and decided to include some very short reviews that I had seen on the back of DVD's before. I chose to use a large bold font with a red colour as this stood out very clearly from the background. What I also did was add another, smaller font underneath with a company name and changed the paragraph to a faux bold to make the smaller text a little easier to read. So after many hours and much typing, this is the finished result:

The (nearly) finished product 

As you can see, This has turned out very well in my opinion in the space of three days from having to learn how to use Photoshop 3 days ago. All that is left to do is add some logos and the sleeve is officially done. Next and final project, and possibly the most ambitious, the movie through premiere.