How did I manage before I had a graphics tablet?

The gentle reader who has followed my blog will have seen the posts I've made about how I put together some of my covers here and here.  Well, I've moved more and more into cutting out and applying figures from Ackermann's prints into Ackermann's prints, and how I managed to do 'Friends and Fortunes' with a touch pad to hold down my cursor to put all those little sepia figures in, never mind Victor and Gilly is a matter that turned the air blue at times. 

So, now I have upgraded to Paintshop Pro 9, and a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet which I thoroughly recommend. 
I had started work on the cover of 'None So Blind' which will be my next regency out, but with the tablet, I had the confidence to do a major repaint of both faces, as his was very low res, and hers was... well very red and very white.  Cleaning up the edges becomes a doddle too...

So here are the starting points!  The man and woman are both 1812, she's from Ackermann's and he's a French fashion plate which may account for him fiddling with the volume button a la Napoleon.

This is what I've made of it so far:

 

No blurb as yet, still wrestling with that... 

Anyway, encouraged by my tablet I started playing about.... 

Here I have a print with foreground and sky added to make it the right proportions to wrap around as a book cover...

 

I pulled up the colour on this by increasing the saturation  but her face was obscured, and it may not be strictly accurate but I cut the bonnet away for the final pic, gave her another eye, and some curls to make her face stand out.  I added a hero for her too.

 And now all I need to do is to write a story to suit it... 

The hero and heroine in this one came as a pair, and I'm not about to turn down an absolute gift like that - they are from Le Beau Monde 1807

And this one is a book on the go, 'The Unwilling Viscount' is 8 chapters in so far...

And just in case I manage a sequel to Vanities and Vexations, I have found some different pilasters to make the foreground from, to put people against.  I used the eyedropper to get the exact same colour as the original...

Not much to look at now, but with pretty ladies and dashing gents leaning on it, who knows!