Progress?

Today, I set out to do what always seems like the most difficult illustration: Book Café. First of all, I have to pick the right books: They have to be colorful, compliment one another without being too much the same, and work with the Book Café mug. Second, the mug isn't made yet (it's on order but won't arrive for a couple more weeks), so I have to make it up from a stand-in mug and put the logo on it, hoping that it looks like it's actually printed.

Here is last year's illustration:

I was pretty happy with it; although the top book got a bit messy, I liked the extreme color contrasts of light and dark (I especially loved the unusual red pages on Crooked Kingdom), and I was pleased with how the shine on the bottom title (The Diabolic) worked out. I also liked the layout.

This year was a special challenge, because instead of just picking three or four recently published and hopefully popular books for the summer's illustration, I wanted books that had titles reflecting our travel theme. I brought about a dozen home with me, but the best titles (Wanderlost, Rules of the Road, etc.) had less than optimum covers (teenagers kissing, can you imagine?). I finally picked four books, three fairly new and one pretty old.

I also just couldn't bring off the logo for the cup drawing freehand. I made it in Photoshop, and although I could have traced it if I'd thought ahead, I didn't bring a printout home with me, and my home printer gave up the ghost some weeks ago, so I couldn't trace it to get it right. Here's a screenshot from the DiscountMugs website:

Arched, spaced lettering is a challenge, beyond me without electronic tools! I therefore opted to just do the "Book Café" part and leave the rest of it off. For that reason and also for the uneasy layout of the books in this illustration (some slightly strange angles make the top two books look like they're about to float away), I may end up doing this over; but I'm happy enough with it that I probably won't, just because of time considerations!

It always interests me what you have to take into account when putting disparate items into a picture together and making them work. I'm kind of sorry that I picked two books (top and bottom) that both had white lettering, because with the white of the 2nd book as well, the whole comes out a little blander than I would like. Also, after I painted the lime green mug and put shadowing on it in darker shades of green, I waited for it to dry before adding the purple lettering, so I spent my time putting in the little shadows under each book. Then, when I put in the purple lettering, it became glaringly obvious that I had used that particular purple only on the mug lettering and nowhere else, and suddenly the picture didn't work. So I went back and added the same purple into all the shadows, and even into the shadows on the mug itself, and suddenly there was a cohesiveness about the picture.

Like I said, I may do it over, tracing the complete logo onto the mug and also perhaps reconsidering my choice and layout of books. This stack was perfectly stable, and yet in the picture the top two look a bit tipsy. And finally, I probably should have put a great big cast shadow to the left of the books, but I couldn't bring myself to risk it, after all the work I put in.

Second-guessing is a bitch.