Home, from the Back

Yesterday when I posted the front cover of my upcoming book, Home, a reader wrote to me saying she was so ready to read it! So I am working as hard as I can, designing the back cover. While the image on the front is based on my oil painting, the one on the back is conjured out of thin air... Here three snapshots I took of the design process: 


Using gimp (a program with capabilities similar to Photoshop) I cut and pasted segments from the image for the front cover, creating a 'collage' on screen. 


Using virtual 'brushes' of various sizes and bristle signatures,  I painted the over the collage, so it became as textured and its lines as curvy as the front cover.


Then I took time off to compose the blurb. Once I was happy with it, I created the text shadows, which are not black but rather the darkest purple in the image. I blurred these shadows, to soften their hard edges. Then I created the text that appears over the shadows. (When text appears over an image that is highly textured, it is important to present any text over a layer of shadow, which helps separate the letters from the image.)