As requested by @katsukisboke, I'll be showing you how I normally make messy covers and how I place my titles! Do note that my messy covers are usually in the light hearted category, so I'll only be showing the process of making those.

Also, buckle up folks. This is gonna be a long chapter.

In all honesty, I don't really see my light hearted style of graphics(known as 'Drops' in easy R and 'Javelin' in Perfect Smile) as that messy. I actually don't think I use that many pngs, I just use ones that take up quite a bit of space! So I tried doing more for this cover to explain how I do it better. This is also a sorta step by step method on how I do graphics in this style as well :D

Take a look at this cover first. As you can see there's a bunch of stuff in it, and I'll be going through each layer in it separately.

1: The background, nothing special. For this style the colour must not be dark, otherwise it sorta defeats the purpose of making a light graphic. It would also clash very heavily with layer 2.

2: This is a polygonal texture. I find that by filling the whole layer with one such texture, and setting the blending mode to 'colour burn', makes the background look even nicer.

3: This is a bunch of dots all straightened up in lines. Found randomly off of PicsArt a couple years ago. I changed the colour from black to this orange colour to make it fit the colour scheme of the cover.

4, 5 and 6: Five is the main thing to look at here. It is a memphis png, one that I find works pretty well with covers in styles similar to this. Layer 4 is a shadow layer, that helps to show the viewer where exactly the png is placed in the cover. Layer 6 is to just change the colour of the black parts to orange. The blending mode of layer 6 can also be set to 'screen' if you want.

7, 8 and 9: Same thing as 4, 5 and 6. Just that instead of black, I set the colour to white to make it stand out a little more.

10: I actually do not know what to call it, but it's sort of a torn-paper type of png, which looks like the checkered background of a png(Basically look at 7, instead of white or black the layer is checkered. That's the colour scheme of the png). It's also two of the same png set into the same layer. I only flipped the first version of the png, and merged the two layers together.

11, 12 and 13: Same purpose as 4, 5 and 6 but using a very different png instead. As the original colour is yellow, I changed it to orange to make it fit the cover better.

14 and 15: The render plus the shadow of the render to make her stand out more(the render is Tae from Bang Dream! I decided to add where the renders are from, from now on so people can look them up if they wish).

16 and 17: It's the orange border that you see in the cover. And yup, layer 16 is a shadow used to help make it stand out.

18, 19 and 20: Shadow, flowers, and colouring respectively. The flower png is actually one flower. I simply moved it to a corner, duplicated it, flipped it so that it ends up in the opposite corner, and merge the two layers together.

21, 22 and 23: They're the borders around the text layer. All three are different colours to make it seem more interesting. The first inner layer is always in a colour slightly darker than the text layer, the second inner layer is white, and the outer layer is in a much darker colour. Flip the order around and it'll look too weird.

24 and 25: 24 is the text layer. Now, for covers like this usually I have the text arranged in a straight line right below the render's face. But since there's an additional face in the render(it being the rabbit), making the text surround the render is also a fun option. It doesn't work for everything, but it does look nice for this. 25 is to add that gradient effect on the text. I used an airbrush and a completely different colour from the text(the text is orange, so I used yellow to compliment it in a way), and brushed over the bottom half of all the text. Then I set it to add and had to change its percentage clarity as it's too bright if it's at 100%.

26 and 27: 27 is the layer with the hand drawn stars. I saw that if I left them like that, some of them would be unclear thanks to the background, so I added a shadow(26) to help them be more visible.

28: The colouring layer. It helps to blend in the colours of the cover more.

29: Completely optional, it's the same texture as I showed in the previous request, only that I changed it to a different colour. Again, be sure to erase the parts covering the render so that it will be more visible!

Now we're going to look at this other example of text placement, a cover I made a couple weeks ago.

(Character: Kazuha from Genshin Impact)

Take note of how the text is placed. The words that have more of an impact(Or the ones that have a capital letter, those being 'Through', 'Maple', and 'Guise') are all slightly larger than the other letters. Though, as 'Through' doesn't deliver as much of an impact, it stays as the same font as 'the' and 'of'. Even though the text takes up a lot of space, it is all placed in a way that you can see the chronological order of reading it instantly.

If you have a title around the length of 'Through the Guise of Maple', I advise you to set them in 'levels'. Words with large impact are to be placed in separate layers while the others are set in between. I also make sure that with every new text level, one part of it is under/above the following level, so that it won't look out of place. At least make sure a single letter of a word is under/above the previous or next word for it to look nice.

Here's another example using a different cover.

(Character: Emu from Project Sekai)

As you can see, the title has two levels with one word placed in the middle of the space available. The subtitle is in a place that would not cover up much of the render(which is a must!) The author name must not always be under the title as well. It can be placed practically anywhere. I saw an opportunity, so I placed it above the render's arm, and it looks pretty nice there so I left it alone after that.

And for now, for 'messy' dark covers, usually only the background would be seen as messy. I mix around three to even six or seven textures at once to make a background. Then I'd add in a few pngs to help cover up some of the awkward space left behind the render.

And that is it for this chapter! I hope it helped!

Thanks for reading this and have a great day/night!