 Hi guys, and welcome back to The Average. So if you've been a subscriber for a while, you've probably seen a few videos like this before where I paint over movie book covers. And the reason that I do this is because I don't really like movie book covers. I think they're kind of soulless a little bit. It depends really on the cover. I quite like this one, I felt a little bit bad painting over this because I think it's quite a nice image overall and it had quite nice embossing and stuff like that but I just think I prefer books to have their own little personality and be a separate entity to the film because I like to look at films as like a different take on a story sometimes. And yeah, I just think it's fun to do this as well. I get second hand books from the bookshop and just paint over them. So I've done a few of these but today I'm going to be doing The Hobbit. As you can see, I've already started. Usually I use like acrylics or something or gouache to paint over these and what I've used today is the paint pens that I own so I've got the Molotow pens that I recently reviewed and Posca pens because the Posca ones are just a lot thicker so I could cover a lot more for surface area in a shorter time which was helpful because we've been here quite a while with those small nibbed pens. So obviously The Hobbit is a prelude to the Lord of the Rings and it's just a super popular famous book that was made into free movies that were kind of milking it a little bit when it was made but I really, I like the first movie of the trilogy of The Hobbit. I just think if you stretch it out so much it loses something so I didn't really like the second or third film that much. It was published in 1937, obviously by J.R.R. Tolkien. I don't really need to speak much about the book I guess. I just remember when I was a young teenager I read this book and I had a vivid memory of this scene that I'm depicting on the cover kind of chose this scene because I remember it so well. It's when they first come across the trolls that are sitting around the campfire but I remember just finding that scene really atmospheric and interesting so I think that's probably why it stuck with me. I think The Hobbit is one of those books that I read quite fast so I didn't really remember that much about it. Even in the films I'm like, I don't really remember. I remember Smaug and him sneaking around trying to get the gold and stuff and I remember really vividly the Gollum scene which was another scene that I was thinking of depicting here but I kind of just went with this one because I think it would have made more. It just made a more interesting piece I think. I love the scene in the book with Gollum when he has to answer all his riddles to kind of get out of the cave and that's when of course you first discover the famous ring so that's a really poignant moment in the book. So I think maybe next time I will draw a scene from that if I ever revisit drawing an illustration from The Hobbit but yeah, I just think this because this is a scene that I really remember it stands out in my memory from when I read this book that I wanted to draw this. Now obviously about the image I really liked the colours at first but then as I was doing it I realised that some of the colours are just so bright that yellow is so bright and I just wish that I had not darker colours but just less like vivid colours because I felt like that would have made more sense for the atmosphere that I was going for. Overall in the end I do like how the piece looks but I wish that I could have maybe used some paints instead of using the paint pens because the paints I think you could just mix your own colours and I think it would have had a much darker theme to it if I had been able to use paints rather than using the pens. In the past I've used paints and the reason that I'm using these pens today is because I recently discovered these Molotow pens and I was getting more and more into drawing with them and creating scenes because they're so opaque they're really nice to layer colours over the top of each other so I thought it would really work for this kind of scene because I've been doing a lot of night sketches with mountains and stars so I just thought that would work perfectly with this cover and that's why I went with using the paint pens. They are very easy to use on the book cover as well because the book cover is so glossy. It was just so simple to just layer down these colours so that was a really nice thing to use and I really like the way that the white looks so opaque and bright and I don't think I would have been able to get that with paints but not as quite as easily as I did with these pens. I really love these pens, I just think they're just really nice and I think I want to do it because everyone's telling me that you can get your own empty ones and fill them up with your own colours or I think you have to buy the brand of Molotow paint and then mix your own and I think that would be a really cool idea and I want to get bigger ones as well because I really like the Posca pens as well so I guess they're both equally good I would say and I think it depends where you're living for the price because the price for me, the Molotow pens were slightly cheaper than Posca's but then Posca's have been coming down in price for me so I don't know, it depends where you live or how much you want either of them. Yeah, so about the cover I wanted to depict the trolls sitting around the campfire and Bilbo and... I was about to say Dumbledore Bilbo and Gandalf and the Dwarfs coming across these trolls the chapter where the trolls first appear is that they kind of sneak up on there and they're all around these three trolls around a campfire and they're drinking and I really like that I wanted to make them grey because I read that they are made from stone originally and that's why when sunlight hits them they all turn to stone so I thought it would make sense to kind of make them a bit greyish as if they are actually made from rock slightly and I didn't want to do too much detail on them because I wanted sort of the focus of the illustration to be on Bilbo and on Gandalf I kept umming and aoring about the colours as well because I started to use black as an outline and I kind of wish I hadn't because I enjoyed the look and feel of the piece without the dark black outline but then as I started using more and more black it kind of pulled everything together and it gave it more definition so I think in the end it worked out I was like, no, what have I done? I've ruined it and then just as I kept going it kind of worked out so that's good I think I was stuck a little bit for a while on how I wanted the trolls to look and how I was going to kind of bring all the capture the characters of them in this illustration but I think eventually I do add some like big noses, teeth sticking out mouths big ears and I just think it kind of works even though they are really simple designs and I do think I like the way all the colours look together in the end because I do try to find better colours and then start mixing them together a little bit and using some pencils so I go with some colouring pencils because I think it added a lot more depth to the piece rather than just having these bright colours in your face I think it just added a lot more to it and brought it all together and made it deeper and richer and yeah, I'm just really glad that I decided to go with pencils on top of the paint pens because at first I was thinking I was just going to strictly use paint pens and then I thought no, if you're not really liking the way the colours are looking, they're looking a bit too sharp in your face then why not dull them down and add different hues to them and I think it really helped I think it really helped bring the atmosphere together of the shadow and I'm just really glad that I did that, good decision past me well done I was just trying thinking of what I could do, maybe I could add more lighting and different shades with the Molotow pens and I tried to use different blues because I think shadows I tend to draw in blues, shades of blues because I think they look nice like that, just like a cool shadow and I think that would be the case for this evening even though the light of the fire is orange I think shadow is being cast because it would be a cold night would be bluish, I don't know if that makes sense but in my brain it made sense, yeah, so just going in adding different shadows with different mediums mostly using the paint pens with a bit of pencil so what do you guys think of the book, The Hobbit have you ever read it, have you read Lord of the Rings my big confession is that I have never read Lord of the Rings and I think I'll probably shock a few of you because you know that I do have a lot of bookish stuff on this channel and Lord of the Rings is probably one of the top sets of books that people are supposed to read if you are into books but I don't know, I just never got into it for some reason, I think because as I was getting into reading the films came out at the same time and they kind of put me off because I wanted to know what happened in the films, which is really bizarre considering that this is a video about painting over a movie cover but there we go so yeah, that's my big confession let me know if you think I should read it let me know what book you'd like to see next and yeah, so just finally adding some final touches and that's it, that's the final piece what do you guys think I think I like it a lot I don't know if it's better than the actual movie cover but I think it's got a different character to it now and something that I can put on my bookshelf and have for myself anyway that's pretty much it guys thanks for watching and I will see you next time