 Hi everyone, welcome back to The Average. Today we are going to be doing another book paintover. Today it's the lovely Shadow and Bone and this appeared as a Netflix series recently which I haven't actually had the chance to watch, but I finished this book yesterday and I'm getting ready to paint over this because I like the book. Basically I like to paint over book covers because when they have movie covers on them I think that they look a bit naff and they're just there to like sell the show or whatever, the film. I really like this cover actually, I think it's kind of cool, it's not too like gimmicky and yeah it's alright but it's obviously selling the show which annoys me and I think that the actual covers of these books are really much better than this. But I want to paint over my copy of this and I'm going to get into it now. I really enjoyed this book because I thought it was like quite like low fantasy, just entertaining. It had a bit of like slow moments throughout the book but I in general enjoyed it. I think it had a bit of like you know the same or kind of tropes of the love triangle and things and I think I would have really enjoyed this book a lot more if I was a teenager. Not to like patronize teenagers but when I myself, I'm talking about myself I know I would have preferred this as a teenager. Not generally so don't be offended if you're a teenager. Yeah and I really like this book, I thought it was fun. It had some really cool elements, I really liked the characters and yeah she's a bit too like the main characters a little bit like I'm not perfect, I'm ugly and then suddenly I'm perfect and I'm not ugly anymore and it was a bit like okay you know. So it was good, I definitely will read the next one because I want to see where the story goes and I did enjoy most of it. I think just like the middle part or the first part of the middle was a little bit slow for me. I don't know if anyone else found out reading this book but yeah it was a little bit like okay what now like where's the drama it was a bit like and now I'm here and it's all smooth sailing but not really but it is just a bit like yeah too generic but I felt like it was a little bit like filler if that makes sense because I feel like sometimes with fantasy books people try to like add stuff into the books to make them a little bit longer so they can have a trilogy. Not sure if that's the case but that's just what I felt. So about the painting that I'm doing I went away and I did some sketches for ideas for what I wanted to do with the book cover because I had some good ideas because she is a map maker in the beginning and I thought it would be nice to have an idea of like having some sort of map and basically they have like these I'm gonna say the wizards they're called the Grisha but they're like you know mages and stuff and each mage or Grisha has like a different clothing to indicate their ranking and I thought because she wears blue when she becomes a Grisha spoiler alert she wears this blue silk and this blue kafta and it will be interesting to like have this fabric in the background of a mirror and then on the fabric is like sewn in little details of actually being a map and I thought that was a really nice idea. In the story there's a significance around a stag so I wanted to have like the two stag horns in the mirror as if she's like looking at herself but the stag is like I don't know indicated in the mirror and also then the black so if you read the book it's very symbolic of like stuff that happens in the book and I'm really pleased with like this kind of concept and I thought that it would be really interesting to try and bring to life and I really enjoyed thinking about different ideas because I wanted to try and be a little bit more brave in the concepts that I created for this book cover because I feel like in the past I've just kind of done a girl on a cover or something like that. Not that I've hated the ones I've done in the past but you know what I mean. I just felt like I wanted to be a bit more symbolic of what is in the book and represent it a little bit more that way but it was also fun to like think of an idea of something different than other than just a girl. Obviously with my horror comic I had this sort of mirror idea for that for one of the comics where she's looking into the mirror and I really liked that imagery so I wanted to play with that a little bit more on this cover so obviously she's not really looking into the mirror but it's a mirror and we understand what's going on. In the story there's a lot of like glitz and glam when she sees like the palace and things like that so I wanted to represent that in the form of the mirror being like this gold glinted thing and in the book I know it's kind of like a trope where characters look into mirrors and kind of describe themselves to you especially if it's told from the first person so like mirrors play a lot of, mirrors are a lot in this book so I feel like it would make sense to have like a mirror on the cover to represent who she is inside and out kind of thing and what happens to her journey and how she grows as a person and different things like that. I think this book was super fun. It's nothing like, I don't know, I wouldn't say it would ever make my favourite book list but maybe it will expand into like better books because I feel like the first of a series is always going to be a bit like introductory and letting you into the world, the world building and this is really good and I know that she has like other series in this universe so like Six of Crows which is apparently supposed to be like amazing and also the King of Scar series and I haven't really heard much about that but I think I will give those a shot because I've heard a really, like a lot of good things about Six of Crows so I'm interested to see what that's about and I think they're all involved in the same universe so it would be interesting to like see how that connects like is it on the same timeline, is this in the past from those books and if do the characters appear in each other's books it would be good to know and I really like the idea of like a writer being able to expand all these books to one universe I think that's really cool and it must have been really fun for her but yeah so I'm using my jelly gouache for this painting and I think that it's working out pretty well for the book cover painter is sometimes if I layer too much gouache it does tend to flake a little bit but I've learnt to varnish the covers once they're completely dry and that sort of helps with it sometimes we do get some flaking like it's a bit random sometimes they're completely fine and then one of the other books that I have was flaking even though I varnished it so I think I just must have applied like too much gouache in a certain area or waited too long to apply the varnish so it didn't connect I don't know some reason I'm sure you guys will let me know because every time I do a book cover paint over everyone's always like you need to varnish it and I'm like I know but yeah I'm going to varnish that off camera probably because I always get quite nervous that it's going to ruin the book I also have like a couple of these book paint overs for sale on my Etsy if you're interested in that let me know what you think and also I've got my comics for sale that arrived yesterday so they're no longer pre-order but they are actually for sale which I'm really excited about okay so that's the final look and I really like it I really enjoy like the paper cut out technique even though it gave me a little bit of struggle to try and stick this down I really like the way that it turned out and I hope that it comes across as if this is the fabric and then there's a mirror and then there's stuff popping out of it I really liked it and I hope that you guys enjoyed watching this book cover paint over I'd like to remind everyone that I do have a patron if you're interested we have a book club which we read a book monthly and we will discuss it maybe you're interested in that see the link in the description down below but anyway that's it for me thanks guys and please give this video a thumbs up if you made it to the end it means a lot and I'll see you next time bye