Stalking Carlos Castaneda; a memoir book cover makeover

I’m finishing up a remake of “stalking Carlos Castaneda, a memoir by Joan Wulfohn. The original book cover design and final fixed cover are below:

At first, I thought I could just go with the old fashioned style, so I found these amazing pictures (which I hope I can still use for something):

There were some of my early attempts:

But then we found out we needed to use a real picture of Joan; we dug around and found some good ones, either of these below would have been great:

The final cover looks like this: very soft and interesting.