Album Art in Photoshop: Step One - Design the Basic Art

Recently, HP and Gwen Stefani teamed up to offer fans some pretty cool printables. The styles of artwork range from just plain cute to downright pretty - but being me, I wasn't going to be happy until I'd played around with coming up with that same style all on my own.

In this guide, we'll create the basic art that will grace our CD label and CD case covers - you'll want to hit my page to find the guide on combining the basic art with other elements to make the actual Album Art. When you hit my page, if you have trouble finding the guide you're looking for, try using "Ctrl" + "F" on your keyboard. This will pull up a search box. In the search box, type "Album Art" and hit the "Find Next" button. It'll pull up, I promise.

To use this guide, you'll need a copy of Adobe Photoshop (versions 7 through the current CS3 will work) or a comparable program like GIMP. Beyond that, all that you need is a little bit of time on your hands.

Design Album Art - The Steps

There will, obviously, be much more than the basic art once we add it to our label and case covers, but for now what we're worried about is creating the basic image that will be the focus of everything else. For this guide, we're going to be emulating the look of one of Gwen Stefani's sets, the red "Love Is My Homegirl" one.

1. New Canvas: We're going to work at a very large size. The reason for it is simple - the larger the size you start out with, the better quality you'll have when using the art in different places. Since we're going to be using the same art in several ways, we want to make sure that once we print it out, nothing has become pixellated. So. Open a new canvas (File, New) that is sized 1000 x 1000 pixels, 300 pixels/inch resolution, in RGB mode, with a white background.

2. Make a Face: Set your foreground color to white and grab the rounded rectangle shape tool. If you can't find this shape, don't panic - it's hiding behind the square shape in your toolbar. To access it, right-click the rectangle shape and choose the one with rounded corners. Then, look under your main toolbar. You'll notice a little box that says "Radius: ?? px". Of course, the ?? will actually have a number. What you want to type in this box is 100. Then, drag it out on your canvas so it looks like a very blocky face.

Now, we're going to round off the sides of the face a bit to make it look more ... well, more like a face. To do this, click "Edit", choose "Transform Path", and then select "Warp". This transform tool is really cool. You'll have a bunch of handles to play with, making it much easier to get the look you're going for. What you want to do is drag the handles around until you have a face shape that you like. Reference Illustration 01 for help.

When you're happy with your face shape, right-click its layer and choose "Rasterize Layer". It will look like it's disappeared into the background, but we're going to fix that. Go to "Layer", choose "Style", and click "Stroke". In the stroke settings, set the color to black and the width to 10. Click OK and your face is made.

3. Grow Some Hair: The hair is going to be done in a series of circle shapes. You'll want to reference Illustration 01 ... but, basically, use the Circle Shape Tool (make sure it's the shape tool, not the marquee tool) to draw hair that will define her head and then define a sort of style.

Now, since some of the circles are just out of control, we need to clean them up a bit. First, go through each circle layer that was made by your shape tool, right-click, and choose "Rasterize Layer". Then, decide which ones should be end along the line of the face. To delete the "extra" stuff, just use your magic wand to select everything outside the face on your face layer, and then select the circle layer that you're trying to clean up. Hit the backspace key on your keyboard to remove it. Repeat for all the circles you want to clean up.

4. Add Eyes & Mouth: The mouth is probably the easiest part of this step, so we'll start with it. Again, it's just a series of circle shapes. You'll need to use two small circles (to keep them identical, make one and then right-click its layer, choose "Duplicate Layer", and nudge it over) for the top lip, and a longer oval for the bottom lip. You can use the Warp Transform tool if you want to make them more artistic.

The eyes are yet another circle, but this one is heavily tranformed using the Warp Transform tool. Make a long oval around the width of the eye you want, and then transform it so that it somewhat matches the ones shown in Illustration 02.

When you're done with the eyes and mouth, right-click the layers and choose "Rasterize Layer".

5. Finishing Touches: I've gone ahead and used the exact same accents as in the original Gwen Stefani album art ... but you're free to do whatever you like. Play around with the default shapes loaded in Photoshop (hearts, stars, they're all free game), and consider what little details you'd like added in.

When you're satisfied with your basic art, go ahead and save it as a Photoshop .psd with all the layers separate just as they are right now. Don't merge the layers, just save.

And with that, you've got a cute little piece of art ready to grace your album art ... or anything else you like!