 Wow that book really didn't want to do my thing. Welcome back to The Average if you're new here. Hey I'm Steph, I'm The Average Artist and we paint on books over here. This video is sponsored by Zyro. Zyro is a powerful and super affordable wed builder which is incredibly easy to use even if the technology drives you crazy. You can create a website in minutes starting from less than $3 a month with a 30 day money back guaranteed and a 24 seven support line. For the Black Friday deal the cheapest plan will cost $1.71 per month. It's a promotion code at the bottom in my link in bio and I want you guys to check it out because you can get a limited time deal which will be up to 86% off and three months free with the yearly plan. Use the code The Average Artist or click on the link down below. I use Zyro to create a fun little portfolio site for myself and it was so easy and quick to use. I really enjoyed working around the navigation of this site and I think it is pretty foolproof. So check it out please guys and thanks to Zyro for sponsoring this video. I'm doing this thing where I paint over movie book covers because I hate them and I think they are disgusting. Wow, I went in hard there. They're not disgusting, I just don't like them compared to normal book covers and yeah, I think we should just get into it because you've been here before and let's go. I have a certain soft spot for Artemis Fowle because I remember it was a book that I used to read a lot or listen to in fact on tapes, if anyone remembers what those are. When I was a kid to fall asleep and I really liked the book, I really liked the story, I always thought maybe Artemis Fowle will fall in love with a fairy in it and then now I'm like that's so stupid as a 10 year old or however old I was. I thought yes, it's gonna be a love story but no, of course not, that's just weird. I think because Artemis Fowle is posed as such an adult in the books, but he's not, he's a kid as well, but he's a genius. Oh, maybe I should go back a bit. If you guys don't know what Artemis Fowle is about, it's about a boy genius who wants to discover the fairyland and the people who live underground in this network of different magical beings, shall we say? And yes, he manages to find one because he wants to help his sick mother, so you think he's kind of like an evil genius boy, but in the end there is kind of like a soft undercourt of like a kid in there, which is the overall arc of his character. And I thought what I would do is, originally I sketched out a fairy flying out and I just, a fairy flying out, well like a fairy and I just didn't like the idea of that so I went back to the drawing board and I was thinking what I could do. So for this particular illustration, I got a lot of inspiration from early 20th century like illustrations and fantastical things like that. If you look on Pinterest and look at these illustrations, they're so nice. Particularly, I stumbled upon an artist called Sidney Herbert Syme, and his art is like stunning and it's mythical and it's really impressive for the time. It's like a really, I don't know, enchanting way of painting and he used lots of oil painting, which is kind of making me want to try out oils again, even though they scare me completely because his work was just so magical and fantastical. I wanted to emulate that a lot on this drawing painting. And I think I succeeded in that. I took a lot of inspiration from his work and then found similar artworks on Pinterest and made like a whole board and then obviously I made it my own and I sketched out different features that I wanted and I just went with it and had fun with it and I just really enjoyed this piece and I think it's actually one of my favourite book covers that I've ever done. I think I'm really starting to enjoy painting a lot more with abstract and under painting and finding colours underneath and layering them up and then I don't know, just making random shapes and then making them into something and I'm sure that as you're watching this, you're probably thinking, what on earth is your painting? Like what is that? But as we go on and I develop the painting and concentrate on a certain area a lot more, I think or I hope rather that it becomes clear what is here and what the overall composition is. I get a lot of comments being like, I look at your art and it looks like a load of mess and then out of the mess something happens and trust me, as a person doing it, I feel that tenfold, like I look at this for at least an hour into the painting, like what is this? Is this gonna turn out good? So I hope if you guys learn anything from me is to just stick with something. It always has an ugly stage and always has a stage where you're like, is this gonna turn out the way I want? And yeah, it will. You just need to keep focusing on it. If you spend time on something, it's obviously gonna get better. So all that needs is time sometimes. Of course there are always the cases of when things are just not, you can't save them. So I think it's up to the artist's discretion to decide when what painting is gonna get through the ugly phase or when it's just plain ugly. Luckily for me, for this one, I decided to keep pushing through because I knew in my head what I wanted and I had sketched out the overall composition and I had a lot of great inspiration to look at and think, and that's kind of how I wanna be. That's like the level I want it to be at. Obviously I'm not saying that I reached that level because this artwork that these people have done is far superior to my little book painting, but it's kind of so nice to look at other stuff and just think, I really like that about that piece of work and try to incorporate it into your own work. I know that might sound a bit like copying, but it's not because what you're doing is being inspired by something and you're making it your own. So it's like looking at a piece of landscape and thinking, I really like that about the landscape and then bring it into your own drawing and then making it your own. If that makes sense, it's all about using and being inspired by other artists and I think this piece is such a particular style that I had to point out that, yes, I was inspired by early 20th century illustrators, probably mostly American, but yeah, this is really nice. If you look up his work on Pinterest, then you'll see loads of images that sort of connect to his works and you'll see I looked at Irish mythology. I don't know why that just popped into my head and I looked at Irish mythology and all the kind of old works that surrounded that and it was really nice to just research something or just look at a completely different style as well because I think I've been sort of set in my ways and to think, okay, how can I make something interesting? How can I branch out and try to do something a little bit different really helped me to develop into making this piece, which I think is my favorite piece or a book cover that I've ever done. I mean, I recently did Shadow of the Wind, which I really liked as well, which is kind of a similar style to this in the sense that it's sort of impressionistic and it just reads as something whereas it's not like perfect painting, which I don't really like. People who do realism, not that I hate people who do realism, I don't particularly like realism myself. So that is something that I never really want to accomplish in my art because that's what I don't enjoy personally. And I think everybody should consume what they enjoy. So for me, I don't really like realism so much. I mean, I can attempt it on sometimes and I wouldn't say that I'm very good at it, but then it's maybe because that's something that I've never really delved truly into or wanted to be completely consumed by. So this is the overall painting and I hope you guys can clearly see what it's supposed to be now. I added the mansion in the background on a hill in the book. It takes place mostly in Artemis Fowle's family home, which is a huge mansion. And I thought what I could do is just have these mythical magical elements around and these puff of smokes as if that's like the fairies or the mythical creatures arriving because I think they teleport in. So this is like my interpretation of that. So it's sort of signifying what could be in the book rather than just showing a clear scene, which is always a piece of advice that I stumbled upon and want to remind people of is when you do a book cover, you don't want to have a particular scene in your head. You want to keep it fairly generic so that it interests the audience but also makes them want to pick up the book because of the content on the cover. But yeah, that's it. That is the final look of Artemis Fowle and yes, I think this is probably one of my favorites that I've ever done. I'm not sure. What do you guys think? Like, do you think this is one of the best ones? I really like it. And I really think it sort of depicts the magic and the drama and kind of the spirit of the book a little bit more than having a picture of the guy who plays Artemis Fowle. Although that was okay. It's just that I really like this book and I think it looks really cool. So let me know what you guys think and please leave a comment down below and please like and subscribe if you're not subscribed already. That would be really, really awesome and I hope to see you guys next time. Also, thank you to Zyro for sponsoring this video. Thanks everybody for watching and I hope to see you next time. Bye.