Creating Powerful Covers

My Little Pickle Press publisher, Rana DiOrio recently wrote a VERY interesting article called CREATING POWERFUL COVERS and she used A BIRD ON WATER STREET as her primary example. Leslie Iorillo was the talented designer on the project.
     The coolest part was seeing the stages the cover went through. And even though I'd seen all of these, I hadn't seen them pulled together like this before. It's also been a while, so I forgot that at one point, A BIRD ON WATER STREET might have turned out looking very different!
     Here were the original concepts:

Which were narrowed down to three directions:

Leslie then did color studies of the chosen direction:

Until - VOILA! The final cover, which I love and adore, was born!       Truly, Rana's insights on the process were enlightened. I highly recommend you go read CREATING POWERFUL COVERS.