Carries War: Book cover idea

My idea for the book cover for Carries War is to make the book look more interesting to the younger reader as the brief specified that it should make young people want to pick up the book as well as parents. to make the cover look exiting, I decided to focus my idea on a part of the book where Carrie and her brother Nick are walking to Mrs Gotobed's house. They have to walk through a scary dark woodland full of yew trees and they think they are getting chased by something. This is quite an exiting mysterious part of the book. I feel like a creepy but rather whimsical book cover will excite a younger audience and draw them into the book. the characters in the book have to walk through this woodland area a lot throughout the story so I feel although it is a good focal point for the cover. 

Here is a part of the book that describes how the trees look: 'The yew trees in the Grove were dark green and so old that they had grown twisted and lumpy, like arthritic fingers. And in Carrie’s dream, the fingers reached out for her, plucking at her hair and her skirt as she ran. She was always running by the end of this dream, running away from the house, uphill towards the railway line.'

Final image idea

So the class has a deadline for wednesday and were supposed to have out first image for out book done. I was sitting at my desk thinking about how i would execute my first image (digitally or traditionally) when Amy came over and suggested a great idea to me. She said that i should try making all of my characters and backgrounds then photographing them and using the photographs as the images instead of just drawing them. I loved the idea so i started thinking about how i could do it. I did a lot of stop motion last year in college so i am quite good at making backgrounds and settings. The first scene is set in the forrest so i started experimenting with how to make grass.

This was my first attempt at grass i think it worked well. I think that i will use this technique in my final image but i think i will use blue paper instead as in my original plan i was going to make the grass blue. I am going to continue to build up the rest of the image but this is all i've got so far.