Hey guys, I'm not much of an artist, but I have a sort of project Im working on and this is my album cover for it. Anything that you feel looks kinda out of place or weird or whatever please say so. I just wanna make sure what im putting out isnt god awful so yeah thanks. http://www.filz.us/view/aca85f89-744/

so first off... this is just awful. it looks like no effort was put in this at all. every thing is made from shape tools in paint? did u draw anything besides the clouds? sry to sound harsh but i see no effort put into this.

Wow... thanks... mind you I dont have the best utilities for creating art (this was made in flash because thats all i have) and I will be honest I mostly used the line tool because that its pretty hard to work with a track pad (once again, all i have). I put a lot of effort into this alright, and i would rather you didnt shit on all my hard work. What i asked for was constructive criticism and quite frankly you're not helping me get any better. Please consider the fact that when i say "I'm not much of an artist" I mean it entirely and you're not helping me work towards becoming one. Now do you have anything helpful to say. What can i do to possibly fix if it looks awful?

Ok, so, I'll try to break down the things I don't like. First, let's talk about the words. The color schemes are fine, but the general look of them don't really look all that well. They're flat and show no real personal touch.

Next, the character. Using shape tools isn't really your friend. While I get what you're going for, it seems underdone. Like you only got the general idea across. One of my biggest problems is the lack of shading. It also pretty much still looks just like the original shapes. It's too generic.

Next, clouds. They're bad. They're too stiff. You probably could've used some gradients (outer shade the same as the sky) to help them get more of a natural feel.

This is horrible because the composition is all over the place and the color scheme is...well... it's all colors at their sharpest intensities (even if you were going for the happy feeling of it, still, it hurts eyes) . My eyes instantly drawn were drawn to the rainbow (which probably isn't the main thing there). Little big planet style character is fine, but you can do more. Clouds look like bed sheets. And for the actual letters, try writing them with your hand. The image just lacks a proper story (it has one but it's all over the place). I'm not insulting you or anything I'm just saying that if I saw an album with a cover like this, I would never buy it, well, maybe for my children. Put more time into this and fix anything that you feel is even the slightest mistake.

If you're trying to make an album art, then it doesn't really need to be fancy. It just needs to be a visual representation of the "feel" or the sound of the album. If you're not that big of an artist, I think you should go for the minimalist style.

Take this one for example. It's nothing fancy, but it was good enough to go with the album and has become iconic. Or this. If you wanted you could have made that more minimalist and just went with this.

They're technically not that hard to do, but conceptually they're pretty neat.

Honestly I just think everything is wrong with what you have there. Restarting it with a new and more simpler concept is the best way to go about it imo.

I see you're trying a very simplistic work. Even with the simplest artwork, execution is still key, and everything still needs to be simple and appealing. An important aspect is colour. If you overuse a wide range of bright basic colours, they stick out like a sore thumb. The best use of simplicity is a vectorised theme, like those Smile has shown you. Soft colours are usually the best way to work with something like this.

Thanks everybody, funny thing is before i saw all these I decided to scrap that entirely and go with a MUCH simpler picture. Thanks a lot though guys.