Winter

 

Cyborgs! Aliens! Mental superpowers! Fairy tales! I am very excited to have finally gotten my little paws on Winter, the conclusion to Marissa Meyer's best-selling Lunar Chronicles.

I'm about halfway through (it is looong) and really enjoying it, but despite knowing it would be my next drawing for about two weeks, I failed to get my butt over to the art store to pick out some specific chalks. I guess I just trusted that I would have what I needed? But I'm a little bummed, because I think I could have found something neon to give it the vibrancy of the original cover.

That was the biggest challenge with this one, balancing all the dark values with the extremely bright apple in the center. I actually colored in the chalkboard even darker where it was supposed to be black (it was easier to tell the difference before I outlined the cover in white), because the gray of the chalkboard was washing out the colors.

But, it came together pretty quickly, especially once I realized I should lay down all the background first, and not worry about layering the white lettering on top of it (which was a good decision, because the lettering looks bomb-awesome).

I still have a lot of this book to get through, so I think I might throw in some past reads before I have to skip town for Christmas. (Christmas! Remember when I drew 25 chalkboard drawings in December?)

Dave's first-view reaction: Mm...very nice.... Good...shading....*


*It was late. Why do we always do these things so late??

Illuminae

OH MAN THIS BOOK. I am a little bit of a mindless space zombie (not the murdering kind) today because I was about halfway through reading it last night and I told myself I would stop as soon as I got to a lull and then it never happened. No lull! I read the whole thing through and then was so amped I almost woke up Dave to talk about it. It's good, man. Believe the hype.

Originally I planned to read it before last weekend, when I was on a panel with Jay and Amie, but something (baby) kept me (baby) from my regular reading schedule (baby baby baby). So instead of me fangirling about Illuminae, we chatted about things like tattoos and Reasons One Should Visit Melbourne, Magical Land of Beaches and Platypuses (platypi?). They were so lovely.

As for the chalkboard drawing--ooof it was a challenge. I hadn't gotten a close look in person before deciding it would be my next drawing,* so I didn't realize that the cover is actually this gorgeous, almost watercolor-like, translucent jacket over a stark white back, so that certain things (the white text, some handwritten notes) pop through. I love it. In person. Not so much in chalk, where it was a pain in the butt to get everything just right.

Since the colors were pretty simple, I wanted them to be perfect, so I headed out to the art store to color-match chalks:

These are the Blick basic pastels, and I'm a little so-so on them. They go on really smooth, almost slightly waxy or oily, so the colors are nice and bright and they still erase well. But man do they crumble. By the time I finished the drawing, there were so many little bits of chalk on the floor, my slippers looked like this:

But still, I was happy with how they all blended together, even if I knew that attempting the gorgeous blooming firecloud on the original cover would be out of my ability. I wasn't sure how it would look all together, but as soon as I started adding in the details, the words, and finally the little stippling over everything, it actually turned into something really nice!

Now I'm going to go collapse on my face forever.

Dave's first-view reaction: Woah! That's so awesome! You're amazing! How did you do that? It looks so good! [I ask him if he likes it better than the last one] What was the last one? [The Western? It was on our wall for a week.] Oh yeah. Yeah, this one is way better. [I tell him this one took an hour. The Western took almost four hours.] Well, I'm not judging it based on time. [I ask him what he likes so much about this one. He thinks.] Colors.


More pictures after the jump!

*I made the rookie mistake of getting an ebook before realizing it's a beautifully illustrated, stunningly designed, typographical dream. After 40 pages of squinting at my Nook, I bought a hard copy.

Vengeance Road

Ugh. HOW beautiful is this cover? I think I have been drooling over it ever since it was revealed, and I knew when I started this project that I had to get Erin Bowman's Vengeance Road into the mix.

It is just SO pretty. I'm a sucker for hand-drawn book covers, and everything about this one--from the typography to the layout to the illustration style to the color scheme--is just knock-out gorgeous.* And all that made it suuuuper fun to draw, too!

When I started the drawing, I figured it was so complicated I'd be working at it all night, but this one actually clocked in at a semi-reasonable 3-ish hours.** I had to simplify it a lot, drawing- and color-wise--the background is the chalkboard background, when the book's background is slightly richer brownish-black, and my version is a little more impressionistic than the sharp lines of the original--but it was really fun and beautiful to see the whole thing emerge, layer by layer.

I started with the gray tones, then I did all the white, the orange lettering, the yellow-orange-red of the flowers, and the guns. Last, I used my chalkboard-colored chalk to draw in the lines and finished it off with some yellow highlights on the bones and guns.

I totally love it and am sort of bummed I'll have to wipe it soon. Time to read veeeeeerrryyy sloooooowlyyyy....


Dave's first-view reaction: Wow. That's amazing. I'm so tired. Why am I awake right now? What am I doing? Why am I not in bed?***


*Design and awesomeness by the amazing Teagan White
**Did I watch Dancing With the Stars? Of course I did. Whatta show. Tamar is NUTS but girl's got grit. Also, Alexa was robbed.
***In his defense, he'd had a long night, starting with thinking our car had been stolen and ending with a late-night trip to Cambridge's secret murder trailer (aka the Fresh Pond DMV). 

Sooooooo many more pictures after the jump!

Carry On

One week on, I've stuck to my goal of reading a YA book a week, and this week, it's the part-Harry-Potter-homage, part-Harry-Potter-satire, fan-fic-novel-spin off, Carry On!

I don't know what magic Rainbow Rowell casts to have such great covers. They're like the perfect combination between whimsical and well-designed (oh man I love that the designer heard "YA Fantasy" and decided "mmm yes two hand-drawn silhouettes in primary colors").

If you looked at this cover and your immediate thought was "Wow! That looks like it would be easy to draw in chalk!" you would have had the same thought as I did and also you would be wrong.

Four colors? Huge empty areas? Beautiful, sign me up. Little did I know that I'd be nitpicking my way around all those letters (ugh. letters. so many letters...). This baby took me about two and a half hours, not counting breaks to watch Dancing with the Stars.*

Dave's Sloan's first-view reaction: What's a Rainbow Rowell?**

More pictures, including me and the dog in silhouette form, after the jump!

*The Halloween episode was pretty good! I am still rooting for Bindi, obvs, because I have two eyes and a heart.

**Today we're getting the reaction from my brother instead of Dave because before I finished, Dave left to go pick up my brother from a 14-hour flight from Hong Kong. They got back pretty late because it turned out my brother's suitcase did not make the 14-hour flight from Hong Kong and they had to wait around to talk to the "compensation guy," Neil, who they described as "a portly guy with a heavy accent carrying around a fat stack of cash." Neil gave my brother $70 for his troubles and, when my brother kept asking if they would upgrade him on his flight back, would only say, "Listen. I'll take care of you." So when they finally walked in around midnight, they weren't in the most chalkboard-receptive state. I'm not sure Dave even knows we have a dining room wall.

A New (Happy) House, a New (Happy) Chalkboard

I'm back! We bought a house, which means I don't feel guilty covering a wall with chalkboard paint, and the baby is in daycare, which means I'm not quite as bone-crushingly-tired as I was six months ago.

For the last few months, our brand-new little chalkboard wall has sat mostly neglected, other than this representation of the fam:

[Not Pictured: Chalkboard drawing of our family.
Because even though I walked by it twenty times a day for eight weeks,
I never once thought to take a picture of it.
It was cute.]

Like a lot of things in the new house, every time I'd walk by it, I'd feel bad and think about how I really should do something with it (and then I'd take a nap). When I launched my book last month, I wanted to draw the cover, but the morning of the party when I'd planned to get my chalk on, someone had to go land herself in the emergency room:

She's fine.

That plan nixed, I still liked the idea of chalkboard wall + book covers. Now that the baby has her own room, I'm finally reading again, about a book a week. And what's better than a new chalkboard drawing every week? I give you: YA Book Covers (in Chalk Form)!

This week, More Happy Than Not, the best-selling novel by Adam Silvera!

I actually met Adam when he was in town for the Boston Teen Author Fest, where I admired his tattoos and introduced him to the second best ice cream Cambridge has to offer.*

I just started the book, which, so far, seems to be like if Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and In the Heights had some beautiful, sassy baby. At the moment, though, my favorite thing about it is that the cover is big, yellow, and graphic, which meant that I was able to finish this mural while watching half of Dancing with the Stars,** plus one episode each of Bob's Burgers and The Last Man on Earth.

I'm going to admit to feeling a little rusty. This is my first actual chalkboard mural in the new house, so there was a learning curve. It took me like fifteen minutes to set up the projector, and eventually I had to perch it on Abby's dog food container:

which, you can imagine how she felt about that:

not great!

And the new wall isn't super seasoned yet, plus I sort of forgot how to draw, and also I ran out of the color for the letters by M-O. But! I pulled it off (minus the lovely blurb from John Corey Whaley, because no one got time for teeny letters), and my dining room already looks more literary!

Dave's first-view reaction: "More...happy...than...not..." Who's Adam Silvera?***

More pictures after the jump!

Don't Call It a Comeback