Initial Designs

I've been experimenting on Illustrator creating some initial designs for my book cover. These give me a basis to work from, and from these I'm getting more of an idea on what does/what does not work with my design.

Fencing
The first element I started to design was the fence that will spread across the entire book - it will wrap around both the front and back cover.

To design it I used a bitmap image of a real fence. I of course know what these sorts of fences look like...but I needed to try and work out how each piece of the fence overlapped one-another to get a realistic looking fence. 

At this point I don't have a concrete decision on what's going to be behind the fence. So I've been experimenting with putting different colours behind it to see what works/doesn't work. Due to the colour of the fencing - 2 different shades of grey - I'm going to have to consider carefully what I put behind. Whilst I can always change the colour of the fencing, I don't want it to look too unrealistic. Some colours clash heavily with the grey - especially since the pattern of the fence is quite prominent and covers such a large part of the page. 

Ripped Newspaper

Next up was the ripped newspaper. This was quite difficult, as trying to create a "natural" looking rip for the paper kept ending up looking rather unnatural - either not random/too random tears etc. I ended up using a tool called the "wrinkle" tool, which produced a randomised 'wrinkle' in each line and is easily controlled and changeable too. 

After I created the shape of the paper, I decided to try and experiment with the texture of it. A plain, block of colour did not realistic, and through my research I noted how a lot of retro designs rely heavily on good, well chosen textures. I used the "grain" effect with a "speckle" to create a very light texture, and made the colour an off-white. 

I added a small white stroke to the 'paper', as well as a drop shadow. I then added some holes and some 'hooks' where the paper will be attached to the fencing. Below is an example of how that works across the entire book cover, with a dark blue background.