Books!

I realized last week that I needed a new illustration to go on the cover of the Reading Logs for this year's Teen Summer Reading Program, since all the books I did last year are beginning to age (their sequels are out, or everyone has already read them). So 20 minutes before closing on Friday, I frantically searched the New Books shelves in the teen section for books that might be familiar or recognizable to some but were fresh enough to be intriguing to most. (They're so new that I have only had time to read two of the five myself.) I laid them out on a table and took a couple of shots with my cell phone camera. I did the drawing over the weekend, but didn't get to painting it until today.

Here's the drawing, which shows what was defined and what got drawn/painted in with watercolor. (Also, what parts of the drawing were unintentionally obscured!):

I realized a couple of things as I moved through the painting--there was some bad planning with putting the two blue books right next to/on top of each other; and I picked some challenging covers to illustrate! Also, I could have arranged them better in terms of seeing more of the covers on the underneath ones.

But...despite not being satisfied with several key elements, I'm so far behind that I'm not going to rearrange or reselect and start over--as it is, this painting took me more than two hours! I realized, from this one, too, that I really need to start painting these things on actual watercolor paper instead of continuing to do them in my sketchbook--while that paper is pretty forgiving, fixing things like transparent shadows is impossible without overworking the paper, and these really needed some fixing! Oh well...

Here is last year's. It was a little better color-balanced, and the layout was more compact.

Stay tuned for the final few TSRP illustrations...