Cover Art (Day 3)

Continuing on with the cover art changes (and again, let me stress, this may all go horribly wrong and it's not like I know what I'm doing)...

There are a couple things I think should probably change.

• The plain black background might be too plain. If I can make it more visually obvious this is SF/F, that would be good.
  
  
• I'd like to make the veterinary connection more obvious as well.

Background Layer

Because the background was a solid black, a few minutes in GIMP (free photomanipulation software — think Photoshop without the BS subscription fee) let me split the image into a separate layer. I added a separate background layer here just to make it obvious.

I also made the final image taller so I'll have room to adjust up/down when I go to put the typography on. (Yes, I am trying to learn from past mistakes.)

Now the question is... what do I want to use in that background layer? Um... I'm not sure yet.

The Veterinary Connection

I think I may want to have some effect like this one (also licensed from DepositPhoto).

The image I'd like to use is something like this (also licensed from DepositPhoto):

Do I have any idea how to create that effect? Not really.

So I guess tomorrow I'll try to figure out how to do that...

We shall see how much I can screw things up tomorrow!