I was going through my archives, and I found the original files I used to create the album cover for Just A Band‘s first album, “Scratch To Reveal”. I still meet people who ask me how the arm was done, so I thought I should post these bits and pieces up.

The arm belonged to my good friend Leni, who’s always game for random shoots, bless him. He’s very skinny, so his arm is worryingly bony. The wrist-band is an old (and very dirty) prop I bought for a shoot I did long ago.

Then I took a couple of photos of cables bunched up together – Firewire, USB, whatever…

Then I chopped the arm photo in the middle, and roughed up the ends using Adobe Photoshop’s Displace filter and lots of dodge/burning to make the ends look like they were ripped apart.

From there, it was a matter of placing the cable photos in the middle section, followed by lots of dodging, burning, cloning and scaling to make the light, shadows and placement look realistic.

Ta-da! Album cover! I’ve since been accused of being morbid, which is only half-true.