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.

 If you look closely on the bottom, you can still see the ghost of last week's More Happy Than Not

The lettering had this super cool treatment where it changed color over the silhouettes,
almost like it was made out of translucent paper.
Super cool, super hard to translate in chalk 

W!!! 

ugh little text. I hate you. 

By the end of the night, the ledge underneath was like a...Rainbow! (aaaahaaahahahaha)

While I still had the projector up, I realized that I kept casting a shadow of my silhouette across the drawings. It seemed like too good of an opportunity to miss, so here's my (and Abby's) interpretation of Carry On!:

(it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize if I wanted to take a picture of my shadow, I'd have to put the camera between my face and the board. Many, many pictures of my confused profile later...)