Oky, before I start, keep in mind, I was kicked out of art school, after a year, so based on that, take everything I say with a grain of salt.
I will try to explain what goes in my mind when I do any sort of art and the approach I do.
The first step usually do, when thinking about art, is to sit down and figure out a central theme to everything, this is usually either by:
- having an idea in my head
- researching other peoples work in seeing what they did
When it comes to art, never be afraid to, not steal, but take inspiration from other peoples work. Every song is written with the same main chords and every painting uses a finite color palate, so look around what you like and so on, to find that "ou I could do this either in my own way or even better".
When that is kinda focused, next thing I usually, is go to google images and start searching for reference material, to see how to work it out. I will use my old banner as an example:
Now, the idea I was going here with, was since it is a music channel, I need to capture a theme, I used a guitar ampliefier as an example.
The control section, with the knobs and so on. When it came to color, I wanted to vintage-esque feel, while still having a sense of "class". So I used a dark red color, with a small black mesh over it, this resembled for me, the color of leather in expensive cars. Something like this:
So you can see, how using a source of inspiration as well as a reference material, you can work out something interesting.
No for all my work I use Paint.Net with a s**t ton of plugin packs in it.
With my new banner, I wanted to capture a 60-esque hippie feeling. There for I took "Disraeli Gears" and "Are you experienced?" album art as inspiration:
This helped me decide on the color tones, as well as font. I also found this image as a source for shapes and items to use in the background:
Here you can see where I took the shapes and the stars from. All this together resulted for me, in my new banner:
Now one important thing, after you sorted all that out, it is to figure out these things:
- what is the main accent and what draws attention
- what is background
- what is the foreground
That way you can decide better on things like positioning and so on. In the case of my banner, the only object that are white are the "name of the channel" and "subscribe" texts. Everything else is colored differently, and colored in a way to contrast over it, there for drawing attention to those elements.
You can do that usually by:
- contrasting colors
- outlines around the object of attention
Not only that, after finishing every element in that banner, except for the text, I put a white layer of color, and reduced its transparency. That way the colors are more "dimmed down" thus even though they have color, they are still not as bright and glowing.
And easy way to know that your image is drawing attention correctly, is after you made it, step back a few feet from your screen, where you cant see all the elements and details, and see what draws your eyes attention. If its the things you wanted to be drawn you done it right.
Remember one thing, sometimes flashiness and over the top can hard the image. So never go over board with stuff, because it might end up looking like a mess. try to keep everything sharp and detailed rather than a cluster f**k.
This is usually the way I do all my art, and anything like that of sorts. I know its banners, but these rules can be applied to anything else.
I hope this helps
