 Hi guys, welcome back to the average. Today we're gonna be drawing on a novel book and this is one of my favorite books that I've read and I really really like this book so it was always a difficult choice for me to paint on this. I know that the cover kind of resembles the actual book cover anyway so it's not that bad of a book cover. I just think like I you know as we say on this channel we hate movie covers on books because I think it's just kind of a cash grab and it kind of takes away something I like to think of films and books as separate entities of the same strand if that makes sense to anybody but me. Lots of people agree, lots of people don't agree so if you're one of those people who don't like me painting on books just go away. It's that simple. Okay so we're painting on the hate you give today and yes like I said it's one of my favorite books I think it's really well written as a really strong distinctive style and voice and I really appreciate that. Like the character-driven story is something that I really appreciate and it's a really good book, it's really interesting and yeah like I said it's really well written. What happens in the book is we follow the main character Starr Carter it's all from her perspective and she witnesses her friend being shot by a police officer which is a very poignant subject matter. It talks a lot about society and and race issues in America and I think it's really well done. I obviously can't really say much on the subject matter except for what I've read in this book and what I know generally in the news and stuff but I've never witnessed or experienced anything like this myself obviously. So it's good to read this and kind of get a perspective on it and yeah it's a really good book so I like I said I'm apprehensive and I'm a bit worried to draw on it. This copy is a little bit up so I think what I want to do is because I want to do a kind of realistic portrait of Starr that I think I'm gonna paint on a different sheet of paper and stick it on now. I've done this before for a couple of books I've painted over so I think it's fine I think it works well because if I want to do watercolor or like watered down gouache then I can't really do it on this cover so I think what I'm gonna do is do it this way but it's kind of the same thing I also think if I mess it up I can just peel it off as well so there we go there's a little bonus for the fear that I feel for painting on this one. So I started to approach this like any other painting that I would do where I did some preliminary work I did some thumbnails and things in my sketch book and then I took it over to this piece of paper and kind of reschedged it out and designed it yeah just pencil everything out before I started to paint over with the gouache. The gouache is kind of old and crusty now that's the update on that it's it still works but it's not as good as it was when I first got it it works more well as a watercolor but it's still quite opaque when I layer it down so it's still pretty good at it for you know a few months now so it's going strong and I'm pretty pleased with it still so I think once I run out of this I'll probably order some more and then yeah I just went in and I sort of treated it as a watercolor painting rather than gouache and I really enjoyed this process because I wanted to be a little bit experimental with my style and just have kind of an emotional connection with this picture because this book is so meaningful and when I read it it just meant a lot to me I do like not because of any connection that I would have with the subject matter obviously but just because it was so emotionally strong and poignant and well-written that I just felt like I really wanted to do a good job with this painter so I was very intimidated at first and as I was getting into it I was really just trying to let go and be loose and try to have kind of a loose expressive style and try to emote a lot of feeling from the character towards us I had this idea of having her in the foreground and just facing the audience and then maybe a crowd of protesters behind her all holding candles signifying a lost life or just you know the protest that they're on or a march or something this doesn't really necessarily happen in the book but I think I read that with book covers it's a good idea to be more abstract with them then actually portraying a scene that happens in the book because you don't want to give too much away and you just want to hint at what the book might be about so that's kind of something that I tried to follow when I do my book cover paintovers because I want to act like as if oh this is gonna be a cover that would be on a book in a shop like I don't know why I just have that in my mind like as I'm going as if I want to portray I want to represent what this book is about and I hope I get it did a good job here I really like this idea of just hands behind her like no faces or anything as if it's sort of a fantastical place as well like this darkness surrounding her and then just the lights and people hopefully sending a sort of powerful message and yeah like I said I was intimidated and I think that the idea that I had works well if I can say that and I think I think in the end I really like the way the painting came out and once they sort of loosened up with the imagery and painting and relaxed a little bit and enjoyed what I was doing then that's when I really started to connect with the piece and it just started to make sense and it started to feel like it looked good to me and I just yeah overall I think that when you're intimidated by something it can be the pressure can wear you down to the point where you don't really want to do it and if you're constantly thinking negative thoughts as you're drawing or painting then it's going to show in the picture so I just popped on like a podcast and was listening to that and listening to music and stuff and trying not to think too much about like how I'm gonna show this picture to everyone because I don't know if you guys follow my YouTube a lot but I mean if you're new here I do a lot of these book painters and sometimes they get really bad negative reactions and usually I don't really mind that much and sometimes it does get to me a little bit but usually I'm like no it's fine whatever you know people are always gonna have negative opinions about you that you can't help that but then when I approached this book I was like oh this is such a meaningful book and it has a really powerful message and so I didn't want to offend anybody and I think people see it me painting on books as if I'm taking ownership of a piece of work but I'm only painting over something that I own and I'm only expressing my opinions and my thoughts through art so if somebody is offended by that it's kind of like well you can have that feeling and you can take that with you but you can't put that on me because that's nothing to do with me like this is my my work and yeah so I was a little bit intimidated like I said but I think overall I really like the way this turned out and it really surprised me because I thought I thought it was gonna be a mess because of the way the pressure that was feeling and I'm trying not to let things get to me and yeah they're not really to be fair like I think I had just had a couple of moments when I was like you know what screw you I don't care what you think about my book paintovers but yeah so if you enjoyed this paintover I have a lot more other paintovers that you can go and look at maybe I think a lot of you found me through my book paintovers anyway so I'm not gonna stop doing them and I really enjoyed this one so there we go that's it I read the books and then I paint over them and I think it's a really good way to discuss books and art as a whole and that's something that I really enjoy I enjoy reading writing and creating art and doing comics and stuff which you could argue is a juxtaposition of visuals and written work for me it makes sense to make my channel all about this stuff that's why I do this kind of thing and I really enjoyed this one and I hope that you did too okay guys that's it that's the final paintover I hope that you liked it this is how it looks now with it on the cover and I think it turned out pretty cool I'm very happy with it and yeah some people ask me why I don't paint the spine see what I do is I I do the cover as if it's like an piece of artwork and then if I want to know what the book is I'll see look at the spine and I can just see it and I think that kind of works separate to what this is I don't know I I think that doesn't really explain very much but yeah that's the final paintover I hope that you guys like it and let me know what you think and yeah I'm happy with this result so okay I will see you guys next time bye