The cover of Avril Lavigne's "The Best Damn Thing."

"Do you know who shot my cover?" asks Avril Lavigne with a hint of excitement.

No.

"Deryck," she says, referring to her husband, Deryck Whibley of Canadian rock band Sum 41. "We just basically got in the car and went to The Valley and I got onto the sidewalk and he shot me. It's a really cool picture."

I didn't even know he takes photos.

"He doesn't," Lavigne laughs.

The cover of her new album, "The Best Damn Thing," (due April 17) features the pretty 22-year-old on the right-hand side wearing a black T-shirt underneath a white short-sleeve blouse with black polka dots. She is twisting a lock of her pink-streaked blonde hair in her right hand. Her new logo, a heart and crossbones, is in the upper left corner.

The Los Angeles outing with the camera in hand was planned, says Lavigne. "I was trying to get the cover. I was like, 'Let's go see if we can shoot the album cover.' And we did it. Dipple came and my friend Sonia."

Rob Dibble is a close friend of Whibley's and Lavigne's who shot Sum 41's newly released "Road To Ruin" webisodes, Sonia D'Aloisio, who long ago did photography for Our Lady Peace's "Clumsy," designed a medieval monogram for Whibley and Lavigne's wedding last summer.

"So basically between me, Deryck and two of our friends, we did the cover," says Lavigne, proudly.

"My one friend [Sonia] created my logo with me, which is the heart and the skull and crossbones, but Dipple helped put on the heart without the skull and the crossbones on the cover, and helped me with the font. We worked on it together, placing it, and 'Do we want the little stars around it or don't we?' 'Move it up. Now move it to the left. Move it to the right. And crop Deryck's picture so that I'm onto the right, instead of the middle.'

"We went through this whole thing and it was really funny because I love the cover and you can pay thousands of dollars to have professionals do all this stuff, but it was me and Deryck and our two friends who did it all on our computer." More Lowdown stories