The Cool School cd cover

My good friend DJ Atlas is releasing another cd. This one is dance-oriented music for children. It's called "Cool School". Zeb (DJ Atlas) loves Calvin & Hobbes, so we decided on a cover that to me serves as a tribute to them, as well as making it child-friendly.

The front cover is the first time in a long time that I've done a project completely in Photoshop. It's all a photo composite, except for when I drew in his shirt, b/c the image I extracted Calvin from had him shirtless (it was a drawing of him flexing in the mirror.) The chalkboard writing is an actual font that I found on Dafont.com, called Denne Schoolgirl or something like that. I tried writing in the title with my Wacom pen, but I like this font treatment much better.

If any of you remember, I've been working on this project for a few weeks, and I found a lot of interesting variations on Calvin & Hobbes while searching for images to use. There were a few anime versions of the characters, some comic book-styled images, and even one made out of sushi or something. I like to see different renditions of a character. It's the same as a cubist, photographer, impressionist, etc. painting the same subject, but they're all different.

I didn't do a rendition of Calvin & Hobbes, since we wanted to make sure children would immediately recognize the characters, but I used color, cropping and silhouettes to make an original image, which was the main challenge. I didn't want to just find an image of Calvin and stick him on the front like the Calvin stickers on people's trucks where he's peeing on some name brand.

The inside cover was done in Illustrator and Photoshop, which is the combination I most commonly use. The squares were simply colored and arranged, while the silhouttes were made in Photoshop and imported in. That font is called "Calvin & Hobbes", and it's made to look like the title font from the strip.

I read Calvin & Hobbes somewhat regularly, and I always enjoyed Watterson's illustration. But now that I've spent a good deal of time on this project, I would like to read even more of the strip. I hope you all like it too.