Awesome Creative Book Cover Tutorial part 1

My friends and acquintances have often asked me how I design book covers. In all honesty, I don't know myself. Just like my writing, I come up with ideas on the spot. With this tutorial I try to structure the process down. So here it goes:

I often use GIMP for the time being since I can't afford photoshop right now. I've used photoshop in the past and have found it very user friendly compared to GIMP. However, at its price point GIMP is a great program to use.

1. I took a picture of myself on my mobile phone which I then uploaded onto my computer.

I also had a picture of a golden drape which I've liked so much that I decided to incorporate it into my image

 

So I open gimp. I go to File >Open, to open up two screens of the images.

 

Now With the drape image I select the rectangle select tool which can be found on the toolbox on the left and select the desired area which I want to cut. Then I right click> edit> copy.

I paste it on top of the second image.

I resize the image to fit exactly on top of the second image.

I adjust the opacity of the drapes to bring forward my second image. if the layer window hasn't already been brought up then just press ALT L to bring up the layer window.

I usually play around with the colour options before producing the final image by selecting Colors at the top and adjusting the colour balance.

The next major change I make to the image is by selecting the layer with the drape only.

The final result was this:

So that's it for this tutorial. Join me next time to see how I really amped up the creative factor and made the cover really different from the source image...