I need help tuning my manga cover!
Hello fellow mangaka!
I am currently creating my first ever manga.
I'm looking to make, finish and enter it into a competition competition, and I've been trying to make a 'near-perfect' manga cover for it so that people will actually look at it in the sea of submissions.
(I know that 'perfect' is arguably impossible to achieve, but I want something where I can look at it and say with certainty, "That looks like an interesting read.")
I've spent all day working on a draft for this, and I feel like all my elements are good, but something is missing up to this point. Below I've attached a **WIP** of it (I haven't finished rendering my characters and background, just so I can get some feedback instead of possibly wasting hours worrying when it could be fixed now).
As a quick rundown, the background is supposed to be more pale to make my two main characters pop out more. I'm trying to go for a more "water-painterly" effect with a specific line-art, similar to Witch Hat Atelier's manga covers; the line art has that oddly specific shading that makes it look straight out of a medieval picture book (I love those covers, and I've been using them as reference so far).
Where I think I could improve is maybe making my current base colours on my characters a little less saturated? Also, adding in some clouds in the background could fill up alot of dead space, but my title will go onto anyways so it might not make much of a difference. The frame could use some work as well, but I'm not sure what I should tune about it.
Maybe resizing a few things, such as how much space the frame takes up could improve clarity? I have no clue lol
I haven't been able to get any advice or second opinions on my work at all, so any comments or tips are highly appreciated!
<< As a little bonus, could you possibly tell me the first few words that come to mind when you see the cover? I wanna see what others think my story is about :) >>