Thank you Marcia Willett: all those books, and all those titles.

I might do all sorts of fancy stuff as part of this job, but I've always done simple lettering for book covers - hundreds of them, many of which I never post.

I love doing them though, especially this ongoing series for Marcia Willett's books, playing my small part in these massively bestselling books.

Today, on the day her most recent book is published - Christmas At The Keep - I learn that she has died. She was amazingly prolific and adored by her readers, and I truly will miss working on her titles.

The Lady Who Paints Legs

Amy Shane is a book reviewer and special events editor for the Independent Voice Newspaper in Missouri, USA, and first came to my attention on Instagram when she recreated one of my book covers...on her own body!

I'm used to seeing my artwork pop up on people's skin via the tattooist's gun - always an unexpected thrill which fills me with admiration and curiosity for the brave human who's done it - but this was different. This was a full-on, body-paint recreation of the cover in all its detail, on a difficult and unusual surface.

Amy's recreated more of my covers since, and as someone will happily talk in public or in front of an audience but doesn't exactly embrace selfie culture let alone photographing anything from the neck down, I wanted to ask her about what she does and why. This blog's normally about what I'm doing, so I thought I would probe someone else about their strange and fascinating hobby!

We, of course have the common ground of the printed book, so I think Amy and I will be in touch for a long time to come.

 She can be found on Instagram as amy_fortheloveofbooks

Please explain what your ‘real-life’ job is, and how you came to be the amazing Amy Who Paints On Her Legs?

My “real-life” job is also book related and why I ended up with an Instagram account in the first place. I am a Professional Book Reviewer, and have a newspaper column called 'For the Love of Books'. I'm nearing on eight years now, so I guess you could say I am always surrounded by books. I started on Instagram because the publishers wanted to see an online presence; honestly, I went in kicking and screaming, afraid I would never figure how it all works. 

After about eight months and totally lost on how to find my own presence, I started thinking about what books really meant to me - when you read an amazing book it’s as if you become part of it, you fall into the story, and well that’s where the idea began. I then thought about making myself part of the story and started researching paints. To be honest, I have never painted before or have taken an art class. I just doodle when I am bored. So, I bought some body paints and started playing, and the rest is history. 

 

My ‘Forest Queen’ was one of the first ‘leg’ paintings that you posted on Instagram. The legs seem an odd choice at first but they’re the natural resting place for a book when reading. Have you painted anywhere else? With or without success?

I originally started on my arm and hand, then my chest. I enjoyed painting on my chest (and matching lipstick to the paint colors) however, I have to paint completely backwards, which at times can be a bit complicated, especially when dealing with words. It took me awhile to realize I could just paint on my legs. My legs also give me space to get in more detail and aren’t a flat surface, which is easier for me to paint on. I still can’t paint on canvas or flat paper, it doesn’t make sense to me either, lol.

Some technicals:

What do you paint with? Do you use both hands?  

I only use Mehron Paradise AQ body paints. After a lot of research, I really value the company and the ingredients they use in their paints. They include:  aloe, cocoa butter, avocado oil, lemon grass, cucumber extract, and vitamin E so they smell and feel wonderful.  

They have also been around for over 90 years, so they have to be doing something right! I also use NYX brand spray primer (Just to get a smooth surface and prep the skin) and matte sealer just as an added protection when I am done.  I just paint with one hand. When it’s nice outside I love painting on my back porch, overlooking the cornfields (where I take pictures for  my stories). My neighbors must truly think I am nuts!

How long do they take you - from x hours to…? 

An average paint takes anywhere from 2 ½ hours to 4 hours, depending on how much detail there is, or how particular I get with myself. And yes, if any of you are wondering: I have gotten so frustrated that I have scraped the whole paint and washed it of before I changed my mind.

How do you wash it off? 

Just plain water. The whole paint washes off in about 10 seconds. Which is why I have to be super careful, and why I add the sealing spray. And yes, I have spilt water on my legs and lost the whole paint. 

What’s the criteria for choosing a book cover to reproduce? 

The cover art is really the first thing I look at, and if it is it something I can attempt to replicate. I can’t do photos, or people. Parts of faces yes, whole people – no way lol. I will also choose a book if I read the book and loved it, or by the author or publisher reaching out. Sometimes I go in themes. Really there is no rhyme or reason to my brain - lol!

Is there one you haven’t done yet that you really want to do? 

There are so many that I want to do, my list grows everyday. One older title I would love to do is 'Splintered' by AG Howard. I loved the series and the cover art. 

Do you have aspirations to create covers yourself? You’re clearly creative, with dexterous skills! 

I honestly never thought about it.  

And how many books do you have lined up to paint at the moment?  

At the present moment I have a list of 13 that are lined up with upcoming release dates,  and 3 already painted ready to be posted.

~ Thanks to Amy for answering my mildly predictable but nosy questions! ~

 

 

If You Could See Me Now, And 499 Other Novels

My accounts lady is currently logging all the ISBN numbers on every book I’ve illustrated, for a report I need to file in Feb. It’s  no small feat, as we’re getting close to 500 *insert surprised emoji face*

What’s been really nice as she goes through the shelves is rediscovering books I haven’t looked at for ages, and of course the majority pre-date Instagram. A few years ago I rebranded every Cecelia Ahern novel for Harpercollins UK - a task I was mega pleased about. I even went down to their office for a meeting about them  - coffee and biscuits and everything - which is fairly unusual now! 

At the time, this kind of organic hand-lettering was still fairly unusual, but was starting to make its way onto more covers here and in the US thanks to my own increasing forays into lettering-based ads, editorial work and book covers, and those of my colleagues Ruth Rowland, Stephen Raw, Jill Calder and Marion Deuchars. Now, you can download a free or cheap font version of something similar to all of these - more on that later - but these were created as individual pieces of hand-inked lettering integrated with the little illustrations for each cover. Although you'd have to tear my Apple Pencil from my cold dead hands, I still prefer to create my type-based work in ink, or at least originate it there.

It’s really nice to see these again; and I don't think I blogged them at the time. They’ve been re-designed since and she’s written plenty more books, but I reckon these have stood the test of time!

This was from the brief, showing what the Harper art team had identified about my work which led them to me for this job:

MANY versions were tried out for each cover:

A Room Away From The Wolves

Nova: a transient astronomical event that causes the sudden appearance of a bright, apparently 'new' star, that slowly fades over several weeks or many months. 

When I heard Nova Ren Suma's name, I thought it had to be a fabulous, eerie pseudonym, with its syllabic simplicity and its space-age middle name. I didn't even know the gender, at first, of this new author whose cover I would be working on - but I knew right away a) they weren't about to fade away! and b) I was fascinated. 

The appearance of Nova's new book 'A Room Away From The Wolves' is far from sudden - it took her a long time to write - but it has proved a sparkling new addition to the richly-layered teen fiction landscape. Without giving too much away, this is a ghost story with, as the cliché goes, a mighty twist, but set far away from any Burtonesque, Disney or period environment; the characters existing, instead, in modern-day downtown Manhattan. With references to a key character's former life in the 90s, this is a story that both a young reader and a 'grown'-up' can identify with chronologically as well as emotionally, with its themes of belonging, friendship, abandoned dreams, broken relationships and accepting who, and ultimately what, you are - and what you never will be.

I read the book first as a manuscript, which is always interesting because at this stage of the process,  the author is still making notes and fine-tuning. The finished copy which I read many months later did indeed differ from the original draft, and that's part of the reason I love doing books so much; getting that early peer into the writer's machine, watching the head-scratching, the changes of tense, notes to the Editor, syntax tweaks, even chicanes of storyline as the author changers her mind completely.

Thus, although a strong and simple story - one which I might add is crying OUT to become a film - this was a tough cover to crack. It could not be too overtly ghosty; such an approach is easy to make 'silly'. It couldn't be too literal; there are a lot of ethereal concepts to ponder, and a suspension of disbelief is required for the key events to make sense, but at the same time, the sense of place was important. Bina, the protagonist, couldn't be portrayed too specifically, as one person's vision of a central character is always different from the next - and Bina is, interestingly, somehow described both thoroughly, and ambiguously enough to toggle-switch-on the reader's own pencil of the imagination.

So what to do? Well, the art director, who I'd worked with on Dreadful Young Ladies And Other Stories, wanted another book that was beautiful. We knew this was going to enjoy special finishes. The book had to be very strong on a book shelf; Nova's previous novel The Walls Around Us had set a precedent there. 

The location gave me the initial starting point for the cover, along with the foggy cool of an early winter evening in New York:

 

But it was an omnipresent dark opal that gave us our central motif, and allowed the next round of roughs to emerge: I created a pile of opals in ink, and some big pages of hand-lettered titles, and used them to generate not-too-directed ideas in fast succession:

These also gave us our colour cues - the purple! Throughout, as is my usual process, I was adding title after title in different inked letters - avoiding the 'goth' and the 'romantic' traps, neither of which were right for this novel.

Then we needed to consider the geography. If you've ever been to Manhattan, you'll know how big the sky is, since you're always looking up at the skyscrapers. But if you can get across the water from Manhattan Island for some perspective, and look back out towards it from say Brooklyn or New Jersey - the sky is vast, and the city glows and hums. It positively sparkles - stars, buildings thrusting upwards, the occasional firework, with flashes of blue light for emergencies. This is where our opal needed to...explode into life. And so we tried a few iterations:

    

In these versions, our opal shards were to be finished in some kind of iridescent or metallic varnish; maybe even a holographic look, to truly make the cover twinkle. But then, Art Director Laura saw what we had been missing in the many roughs we were discussing - the central lettering, the mesmeric skyline against the moon, the purple glowering of the all-ink sky - and the window light. I'd added a single, tiny one in the lower buildings (for reasons you'll learn upon reading!) - and suddenly, there it all was.

With a little fine tuning here and a bit of preening there, the cover was before us. And this is the one it went to press with, on flesh-feel, pearlescent stock, which allows the lettering and the moon to glimmer through:

The back has a hand-written 'blurb' (no hand-lettering style fonts here - this is the real deal):

Watch the iridescence as the book moves in the light! (shady iPhone vid):

I am as delighted with this cover as it's possible to be, and I know that Nova is too. You can enjoy Nova's lively, conversational promotion of the book by following her on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook - and to get a copy of the book, go here.

And if you're in the US, you can catch her one one of her book tour dates:

Thank you Nova, and Laura Williams, ever-patient art director!