Cover Creation - Designing Ducky

I've had the design for Ducky in my head for a couple of months, but no time to execute it... and we all know what happens during execution, right? Yeah... so here's what I did to put the Ducky cover together:

First, I selected a background picture from Dreamstime.com - a devastated city.You can check it out below.

© Photographer: Asiavasmuncky | Agency: Dreamstime.com

After that, I went out to find a picture of a duck - literally. I took my camera out to the local pond.

...and ended up settling on the first picture.

Next,  I took both pictures and clipped them down to book cover size - I use 1875px wide and 2875px tall.

For the duck, this first entailed enlarging the height of the picture,

followed by trimming the width, 

and turning it blue using the TOOLS--COLOR TOOLS--HUE SATURATION selection in GIMP.

I decided that it was too light, so set about darkening it using the TOOLS--COLOR TOOLS--BRIGHTNESS-CONTRAST TOOL selection in GIMP.

4. Once I was happy with the duck and the ruined city trims, I opened a new picture in GIMP, sized it at 1875x2875 and set it at 600dpi. I then used the bucket tool to colour the base layer black.
5. After colouring the base layer, I imported the city trim and then the duck trim as separate layers. I kept the duck layer on top, but reduced the opacity to 64.3 in the Layers dialogue box.

At this point, I thought the picture was too light, so I darkened the city layer - and then I added the title and author name.

There was still too much empty space between the duck and the title, so I added a short sub-title.

And then, of course, I had second thoughts and tried the cover without the colouring:

And, now, I'm not sure which one to choose...

Until I realised that the duck in the last two pictures was positioned differently, so I moved it...

This time, I think I *do* like the blue one better... maybe.