Building the Cover: Before and After

I used the free paint.net photo-shopping software to make the cover, and I got pretty well acquainted with it, including researching and downloading plug-ins to get more features.  Here are some of the before and after images that went into the cover.

For the background, I took an image of an emerald, cut & pasted it several times, flipping and rotating it until I got a pattern I liked.  I ended up tinting the entire thing to tone down the blues, and I darkened the top and bottom so the words would show better.

Here is the before:

And here is the after:

The boy is my son Matthew.  I had him hold a shop light in the basement, then photo-shopped out the background, and used a clone tool to 'erase' the lamp and move and highlight his left hand.  For the gem I took another actual emerald picture, twisted, reshaped, cloned, etc. to get the shape I wanted.  I had to copy just his hands so I could layer them on top of the gem and make it look like he was holding it.
I used a feature to convert the image to a cartoon-effect.  I did a lot of playing with his hair to make it look blonde.  I actually took a picture of Brian and arranged pieces of his hair to match Matt's style before doing the toon thing.  Then I had to do a lot of color adjusting afterwards to make it show up.  A couple of added lens flares, and a lot of playing around with fading/transparency and ta-da!  Here's the picture of Matt, the one of Brian I used for hair, and the gem:

And here's the result:

 For the cliff-side building and waterfall (which is in New Zigon, fyi) I did some major cutting, pasting, and cloning.  I took aspects of these pictures:

 And got this:

Which I 'cartooned' and faded to get:

Add some wording with fancy shading and beveling, and you get a cover:

I'm pretty sure I now have carpal tunnel from using the little mouse button on my laptop!