Cruising towards disaster

For the third year in a row, our Teen Advisory Board (TAB) is creating an original lock-in murder mystery night as the finale of our Teen Summer Reading Program. Since the theme is "Reading Takes You Everywhere," interpreted as "travel," I suggested they place their murder on a bus to Washington, D.C., for their annual choir concert. No, they said, a bus didn't give enough scope, they wanted to fly. Okay, I said, murder on a plane!

They thought about it for a while and decided that this was likewise lacking in scope: Where would they accomplish the murder? A bathroom was too, erm, icky, and nobody wanted to be crawling around in the luggage space. How would they discover the murderer? After all, the audience is supposed to be able to walk around and question the suspects and the innocent standers-by, but how would that happen in the close confines of a plane? Also, they wanted more of a theme for their merry band of possible killers.

So the final choice was, murder on a cruise ship. And most of the suspects (and the murder victim) are members of an acting troupe hired to entertain the passengers, so the murder could take place on stage. I was happy to go along with this, as long as they gave me their venue and their title for this year's passion play.

Oh, a title. Much brainstorming ensued. The favorite (to much laughter) was "As-sea-sination," but they ultimately decided that while it showcased them as the ultimate punsters, it was a little hard to grasp for the uninitiated, let alone spell. So the final choice was "Death on Deck," and now it was my turn to provide an appropriate illustration.

Here it is. We'll see what they think of it.

My only personal concern is that the smoke "effect" is too realistic to go with the somewhat cartoon-y nature of the rest of the drawing. After looking at a lot of photographs of actual cruise ships, all of which were unimaginatively shot horizontally from the side, I ended up semi-copying someone else's drawing that had the qualities I wanted—the looming prow, the row of life boats, and not too much complexity in the windows. While cruise ships today don't have the smokestack, since the TAB has already decided that this might have taken place "back in Titanic times," I appropriated and added the smokestack so as to be able to also add the atmospheric suggestion of death coming out of it!

I also neglected to put a ship name (the USS Sappy Seas?) on the prow, as would normally appear. I'm going to ask them about that and will perhaps add something, though I don't want it to distract too much from the title of their "play." We'll see.

Do-over

I posted the last one on World Watercolor Group's Facebook page, and asked for opinions. It was about evenly divided between "I like that the books are flying off the page! It's lively, and it's not a photograph, it shouldn't have to be in perfect proportion" and "Every book is drawn from a different perspective, what were you thinking?" (What I was thinking was, I'm NOT good at perspective—if I could have made the first one proportionally correct, I would have!)

So, I did it over. I decided to simplify, by using three books instead of four, and simply setting the mug on top, instead of having it shoving a book off the pile (which worked last year but somehow just wouldn't, with the exact same mug, this year). Since I was doing it over, I took the opportunity to switch out one of the books, and I think the resulting color combo is more pleasing to the eye.

One would like to think that one's skills improved progressively over the years, but I have to say that I think I did a better job both last year (see previous post) and the year before (below). But...it will do! On to the next challenge...

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.