Secret 7" Age of Reason - Black Sabbath [Initial Designs]

I wanted my design to be fairly minimal as I thought these looked the best as album covers. The person viewing it might be intrigued into what song the cover is representing and it also links to my theme of mystery and unknown. 

I was randomly inspired to create a 3D sphere for my design while playing pool. I thought the 8 ball looked like a planet on the blue table so I decided to photograph it close up.   

I created the sphere by adding a couple of layers of gradients and shadows to get a 3D effect and some grain for an extra layer of texture. I wasn't initially sure of what colours to use - the back ground needed to be dark as it was a planet in space. I wanted the colours to stand out and found that the pink created the most contrast and was eye catching and different. I will ask as one of my questions in the upcoming crit if the colours are appropriate and hopefully will gain some suggestions.     

I ran into a problem when test printing the design as I had produced it in RGB so some of the more vibrant and saturated colours had been dampened down because of the printers limitations. 

CMYK Mode:

I managed to adjust some of the colours when in CMYK mode on photoshop until I got the colours I was happy with and would print correctly. 

Printed version:

Alternative compositions

For the crit coming up I want to print a variety of these layouts to show as I am not sure what communicates my concept the most effectively and what design people prefer in general.