Cover Fun, Procrastination, and NaNo Day 10

Word Count: 14,369 - about 2300 words behind. Totally doable.

Mood: Happy

Surprises: today I have a surprise for YOU! Okay, only sort of. I mean... never mind let me just go with this.

So I've been wanting to create a cover for my NaNo novel. Really badly. The society in the novel is sort of obsessed with trees. I think I may have mentioned this before. They count time in seasons and rings instead of months and years, etc, etc. And the novel opens with a funeral where Evva performs a ceremony with a leaf. So I've been weaving in a lot of tree/plant imagery and speak. It's petering out as I just try to write, but it's something that will be important in the novel as I work on revisions later, so I wanted to cover to reflect that. I thought it would be fun to go out and take some pictures myself and play with them so it would be totally my work. Today it was gorgeous, so I took a break from grading in the afternoon, found a leaf I liked and started a photo shoot. I ended up laying flat on my back in the grass, holding the branch with the tips of my fingers as I blindly took the picture since the sun was so bright. I love the way they came out. Then tonight I allowed myself to play with Photoshop while Vampire Diaries was on. This is the first cover I came up with:

 I like the look of it. I love the starkness of the red leaf against the sky and the clouds cooperated perfectly. But it seemed a little - I don't know. Plain or something. so I played with it a bit more, adding some really faded layers and developed this:

I like the lettering of the name on this better and I love the faint leaves in the clouds. But I changed the title a little bit and I'm not sure I like it. I'm also not sure if the single leaf isn't a better image with the title being Solo.
But the main thing is I had a ton of fun with it.

What do you think? Have a preference between the two? Do you ever make fake covers (or real covers ) for your WIPs? Is this a reasonable form of procrastination? :)