Cover Art For My Work-In-Progress

I'm running full steam ahead with my current novel. It's going so well it's almost uncanny. I had the general idea for it over a year ago and started something, but it petered out about a quarter through - I'd just started it totally wrong. A few months back I had a better idea of what to do with it and couldn't wait to get started. So now I've managed 48.000 words since the beginning of March and am still going strong. Considering that I work full-time and have my studies (more on that in the next post), plus spring is keeping me outside a lot, I'm really proud of myself. This story is so much fun with every scene. Sure, it's still a very rough first draft because I'm burning through it so fast, but I'll fix it when it's finished. The fact that I now use Scrivener makes not editing everything right away even easier, because it's a breeze to jump around in the manuscript and find certain scenes, or change them around or... it's just easier. Totally worth its price. Period. 


Anyway, I always like to do mock-ups of covers for the stuff I'm writing. I get some pics off Google Images and create something in MS Power Point. The first one I did for this story, the first version about a year ago, looked like this:

Not too shabby, all things considered - Power Point isn't exactly an image editing program. But of course the pics are copyrighted and I didn't buy them or the rights to them, so on the off-chance that I decide to publish this novel (or any of my others) through, let's say, KDP, I couldn't use something like this. So a few days ago, I finally decided to have some fun doing this the right way. I opened an account at Shutterstock and bought the five-pic download option. I downloaded two pics that fit (I found many more, but these two just screamed I'm The One for this!!!!). Then I bought and downloaded Pixelmator, the image editing software for Macs. I thought about getting Adobe Photoshop, but that's very expensive and I've never used such software, so I decided to start out 'slow'. 

Incredibly, not even two hours, lots of fun and only a few cuss words later, I had this:

I realize this isn't perfect, either, but it's miles closer to something usable, and lightyears closer to the tone and feel of the story. So for now, that's going to be the cover of my work-in-progress.