Designing CD covers

I took graphic design classes in high school since my 9th grade year. And I got advanced with it once I reached my senior year being able to import from Illustrator to DreamWeaver and all kinds of stuff and improving my drawing skills in the process. But I didn't realize how demanding of a field technical and graphic design was until I got into this semester of college, Fall 2013. I am a year and a half into college   but I was originally an IT major until they cut out the web design and development track to I switched to graphic design to get some training done in Adobe software. 

Just about a week ago we were assigned to design CD covers for a band. We had a list to chose from, I chose Evanescence mainly because I am a rock and metal music lover.... well I confine myself to that kind of music because I like the sound and beat of it. But we had to create it all using Photoshop. Normally for projects like this I would finagle the tools in Illustrator but Photoshop was what we are going over in class. 

I am not real familiar with Photoshop but I couldn't figure out a design for the background of the cover so I went onto Google and Kunaki for some free templates and found a really cool background for the CD cover and added a photo filter to make it fade out of purple to blue because I chose to stick with the color scheme of Evanescence's What You Want album. The combination of the purple, blue, aqua and cyan green fascinates me and I thought that would make a good color scheme for a black background. 

Just turned it in today so here is the final product .... Just for a classroom project though nothing major. I'm pretty satisfied with it :)