Revised Book Cover Scarface
The original book cover in my opinion lacks the drama of its tragic lead character. Tony Montana is ruthless, compassionless and has clearly gone over to the dark side of his nature. He communicates to the world through blood and violence to the point where he becomes inhuman. He reduces the people in his life to two categories; those he perceives as a threat and in need of elimination and those he "loves" through control and manipulation. My book cover will emphasize the de-humanization of his image while showing the brutality and bloodshed that defines him.
My intention was to make Tony inhuman. The decomposition of his face was achieved by manipulating the color and rearranging the pixels to get a flat gritty likeness of the original image. He is meant to look dead while still alive, a shell of a man looking out of dead eyes. Only one glint of light off his right eye alludes to life. The stark black and white of the background represents good and bad. Here Tony’s image is shown to be part of and connected to the black background. He blurs into the darkness. The gleam of his necklace and eye show the only bit of light in his picture. The bullet ridden font used for the word”Scarface” is colored in blood red. The highlighting and faceting of the font make it look wet and dimensional. The type seems to be wrapping itself around his head as if his nickname, blood and violence enshroud him.
The only image I chose to take from the original book cover was the face of Tony. I also needed to retain the book title and its author. I chose not to use its other verbiage in my new cover. To achieve my image I had to do the following to the image and text;
1- I isolated Pachino’s image and put it on a new document.
2- I had to clean up the area where type was on his head. To do this I used the eraser tool along with the clone tool.
3- I solarized his image as per the tutorial in module 4.
4- I adjusted the hue/saturation and vibrancy of the image along with adding 5% noise.
5- I chose Starshine MF font and manipulated it as per the module 4 tutorial. I further manipulated it by selecting it and distorting it by manipulating its anchor points.
I performed the following additional steps for my final submission;
6- After choosing a font color I further manipulated the type by adding the special effects of drop shadow and bevel & emboss. To access this window I double clicked on the text layer. This helped the verbiage look more dramatic and dimensional while giving the characters a wet, bloodlike feel.
7- I polarized Pachino’s face by going to menu/adjustments/polarize. The sliding scale enabled me to reduce the shades of black/white/grey to a few. This effect flattened the image and gave it a more gritty, harsh and iconic look.
The entire process was a series of experiments with the manipulation of various effects. I tried many effects under image/adjustments and under filters. Some of them didn’t give me the effect I was looking for so I kept experimenting with other effect tools until I was satisfied with my image.
Image citation;
Banks, L.A. Scarface. 2006 Publisher: Dark House Comics. Milwaukie, OR.
Print
Amazon.com. Bookstore. 10. 20. 2011. Web.
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