Design Awesome Industrial CD Cover Art

Step 1

Creating a new document (600X600px) and fill your canvas with black:

Step 2

Download this great Metal Texture and paste it into your document.

Go to image>adjustments>desaturate to grayscale the texture, then go to image>adjustments>levels and apply the settings shown below.

Finally, reduce this layer's opacity to around 10%.

Step 3

Create a circle in the center of your canvas and fill it with neon blue (00f0ff).

The use your elliptical marquee tool to cut away parts of your circle, leaving shard like pieces forming a ring (see below).

Go to filter>blur>gaussian blur and apply a blur of 6.6px. Then change this layer's blend mode to 'overlay'.

Step 4

Open your 'actions' window and create a new action called 'circle rotate'. Press record, and duplicate your shards layer, and then rotate it 20 degrees. Stop recording your action, and then in your actions window keep hitting 'play', until you have around 8 duplicate layers comprising your ring. This should repeatedly duplicate and rotate your shards layer, until you end up with a completed ring shape:

Step 5

Select your radial gradient tool, ranging from 00f0ff to transparent. Drag out your gradient from the center of your canvas to the edge of your ring. Then change this layer's blend mode to 'overlay' and duplicate it twice.

Step 6

Cut and paste the image of a skull into the center of your document.

Then go to image>adjustments>desaturate to grayscale your image, then go to image>adjustments>levels and apply the settings shown below:

Step 7

Cut and paste in this image of a pole.

Apply a desaturate and levels adjustment, and then rotate and duplicate your pole to stem out from the corners of your skull image. Make sure that your pole layers are behind your skull layer, and then merge them together.

Step 8

Paste in this image of a cog (cog photo) and then desaturate it and apply the levels settings shown below:

Step 9

Merge all of your cog layers together. Then select your 'poles' layer>layer mask>reveal all. Use a medium, soft, black paintbrush to paint over the parts of your poles overlapping your cogs.

This should give the impression that the poles are going into the center of your cogs:

Step 10

Use your pen tool (set to paths) and draw out a tab shaped area in the left of your canvas. Go to your paths palette and right click on your path, clicking 'make selection'.

Then fill your selection with a linear gradient ranging from 1e1921 to 656565 to 1e1921.

Duplicate your tab left, and go to edit>transform>flip horizontal. Move your duplicate to the right side of your canvas:

Step 11

Now create a new layer beneath your cog layers, but above your background and texture layers.

Select your radial gradient tool, using a gradient ranging from ffc000 to transparent. Then drag this up from the bottom-center of your canvas.

Duplicate this layer, and then on another new layer drag a radial gradient top from the TOP center of your canvas. Make each of these layers have an 'overlay' blending mode.

Step 12

Now place some text at the top and bottom of your canvas, with the band name and album name for your cover.

Apply a drop shadow, inner shadow, bevel and emboss and gradient overlay blending option (settings for each blending option shown below). This should give your text an awesome 3d metallic look:

Step 13

Now go to your adjustments window and apply a gradient overlay adjustment layer. Reduce this layer's opacity to 10% and it should give your cover art a nice added tone:

Step 14

Grab this photo of a CD Case.

Flatten your original cover design document, and then copy and paste it over your CD Case photo. Go to edit>transform>distort and distort your cover design to fit nicely over your case shape:

And We're Done!

You can view the final outcome below. I hope that you enjoyed this tutorial and would love to hear your feedback on the techniques and outcome: