User blog:AwesomeEthan48/AwesomeEthan48's Custom Album Cover Tutorial

Have you seen the Custom Album Covers I (and other people) did or official Death Battle music track covers and thought to yourself, "Man, how do I make one of those things?"

Well, you've come to the right place! Let the Death Battle Wiki's resident artist guide you on making your very own Custom Album Cover!

Step 1: Getting the Necessary Items
Before you can start working on your Custom Album Cover, you'll need a few things in order to do so:

Item 1: A Drawing App of Some Kind
While you can do a rough draft on paper, going digital is the best idea for making your CAC. I'd suggest ibisPaint X, as that's the program I use and it's gonna be the program used extensively throughout this tutorial.

Item 2: The Album Cover Background
Yeah, this one's kind of important; how can you make a final version of your CAC without the background?! Thankfully, you can use this one I have with me. I'd highly suggest using the full size of 1080x1080 in case you want to add minor details.

Item 3: This 8-Line Grid
This one isn't necessary, but I'd highly recommend it. This grid thing will help you if you want to center a layer.

Item 4: The Text Below the Title
The second-to-last thing you need before starting is the text underneath the title of each official (and unnoficial) track cover. Unless you're me, change the "AwesomeEthan48" to either Brandon Yates, Therewolf Media, or your username (I'd highly suggest doing that last one so people know you've done it).

Item 5: An Idea
Yeah, this last one's VERY important. Besides, you need an idea to get started in the first place!

A good Custom Album Cover idea consists of 2 things:

For this tutorial, I'll be doing this request by 1pizza877 (and I'll combine the two proposed ideas), but you can do any idea you have, whether it's your most wanted matchup or a request by someone.
 * 1) An image that refrences the 2 combatants (or more if it's a CAC for a battle royale)
 * 2) A title that references the combatants in some way (i.e., Retro Rivals references the fact that Mario and Sonic have been rivals since the Console Wars in the 90s, a time of retro appeal looking back at it)

Step 2: Setting Up
Now that you've got everything, you must now organize them fo drawing purposes. The idea is an exception, as you can store that information in your head. For reference, this is how the other things should be sorted in ibisPaint, color-coded for your convenience: The Text Below the Title and Album Cover Background are hidden so that they don't get in the way of drawing the actual track cover itself. As for the blank layer, you can have as many as you need (i.e., one for a rough draft, one for final outline, one for coloring, one for shading, etc.)

Step 3: VERY Rough Draft
Now that everything's in place, you're finally readdy to start working on your Custom Album Cover, starting with the rough draft!

While I usually go into a CAC with an idea already i my head, you may need to plan out what elements of a character goes where. That's where the rough draft comes in! The rough draft let's you draw rough sketches of the elements that reference your fighters and move them to a place you think works well.

It may take a few layers if you have sereval elements you want to put. Once you're done with that, merge all those layers together and center it. I'd also suggest making the rough draft 50% visible, as shown below: Do keep in mind that this is the rough dtaft, so feel free to move elemts around if you don't feel like they're in the right place.

Step 4: Drawing the Outlines
Now that you got the rough draft, it's time to start drawing the outlines for each and every part of the track cover.

"But Ethan, how can I make it not look like a crappy MS Paint job?"

Well, I'm glad you asked!

Reference Pics
Reference pictures/reference pics are pictures of the elements you're including that you can use help you in the drawing process. With reference pics, you can:
 * Draw the element based on what you see on the reference pic.
 * Put the reference pic in the middle, set it to 50% opacity, and trace it on a seperate layer.
 * Put the reference pic in as a part of the track image.

You want to aim for that 1st method as much as possible. However, don't feel bad if you need to trace the image on a seperate layer if there's small details you want to include or if you're not that good at drawing. I use the 2nd method all the time for cetain elements of cetrain CACs, so it's fair game.

You can do the 3rd method, try to do that as little as possible. Some elements from some of my CACs (the Monado Arts in "Power of the Blades" and Punisher's skull logo in "Dreaded Punishers", for example) are PNGs I used because I was too lazy to recreate them nearly 1:1. But if you're someone like Austin James A who uses just PNGs (esspecially in uncreative ways), that that's just being EXTREMELY lazy, so don't do that.

Here's an example of what the outlines should look like:

WIP!