Digital Art Okay, I've jumped on the bandwagon and I've got no clue what I'm doing

First things I've done with a graphic, apart from some Sonic recolours I did when I was around ten years old.

Gurren-Lagann was done via a tutorial, Elfen Lied was elements of the tutorial plus me messing about.

I'm not asking whether they suck or not, that's already clear. I want to know how I can stop them sucking. Preferably in a language I understand.

 

First tag
The background's not bad, I actually kinda like it, works considering the context of the anime (though it is a bit too white, and the rather white stock that you used can be undifferentiable from it in some places). However, you did nothing but slap the stock onto the tag and didn't blend it at all. Next time, try to do a simple blending (like duplicating the stock layer, then Gaussian blurring the bottom stock layer slightly). As you make more stocks, you'll learn blending methods that are nicer and much more natural looking. Not bad for a beginner tag.

Second tag
A bit better than the first. The colors of the background work for the stock, and the text placement is decent, but the background itself is a bit boring and bland. Try to spice it up a bit with brushes or C4D's. You might also want to try and develop flow. Notice how your stock is positioned:



The arm seems to be moving towards the bottom of the tag in that general direction. Synchronizing different parts of the tag (the background, effects, C4D's, etc.) to seem to have a general movement in the same direction as your stock is called creating flow, and it can improve pretty much any tag. Also, are you using Photoshop? If you are, try messing around with adjustment layers, mainly gradient maps. When done right, they'll make your tags look quite smexxy. Just don't over do them. Lower their opacity and mess with their blending options, because they look dull at 100% opacity.

Not bad for a beginner. Keep at it, man.

 

In the first tag, I can see that you were almost going for a blood-splattered effect, which is good considering it's Elfen Lied, but it looks washed out to much. It kind of looks like you just plopped the render down in front of a background. You need to maybe add some smudging around the focal image. Also try doing the same with the text. It stands out more than anything else in the tag does and stops the flow of it in general.

As for the second one, the whole thing looks a bit dark to me, though it is an improvement from the first tag. Try blending in the text better and maybe adding a backlit effect to the stock so that it doesn't get lost in the tag so much.

Nice work here, Pika. I hope to see more of your stuff. :3

 

Any better? I tried making it less dark, but I'm not sure whether it's a tad bleached. I added in a brush effect around the Eva at the last minute, so I'm not sure how well that works.

As for the background, I've forgotten how I got it.

Am I on the right track?