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!

Dem bones

I just realized that these flowers sort of look like they're about to bite your face off

Prickly

Guns! I'm working on my own Western, and so I now know lots about guns

Hand-drawn lettering is sort of the only thing that actually looks better on chalkboards
(and a lot better in real life).

Those curlicues were a lot of fun

Dat R

Poor lil guy

The original! Don't you just want to hang it on your wall?