Recreating my Favourite Book Covers: the lunar chronicles edition

So, I had this interesting idea to merge together two things that I passionately love: Books + Art, and create a really interesting post. But along the way, it kind of……lost direction, and I kind of don’t know what the PURPOSE of this is anymore.

But I’m going to go along with it and see what comes out of it because I spent entirely too much time and suffered too much neck pain for this to go to waste

So, from the title of this post you can see this is about:

Drawing My Favourite Author’s Book Covers

and my initial plan was for this to be more of a challenge, so here are the rules that I wrote down but didn’t entirely abide by

🌟 The Rules: 🌟

• I have 30 minutes max
• I can sample colours from the original cover but I’m not allowed to use any outside images or any tracing from the original covers aside from fonts, which are either from the internet or taken from the original covers like i did in this post
• I can use different brushes to create different textures found on the cover
• and this one is for you guys, at the end, you rate how well you think i did compared to the original cover in a score out of 10

 

Basically, I followed the rules for the first cover but slowly, as they began to get harder, my perfectionist heart won out and I threw all the rules into the garbage.

I began fussing, adding more details, redoing certain parts, and even tracing certain areas and whew, what do you know?? hours have gone by. I couldn’t serve you trash ok, cut me some SLACK

So……….oops?

Getting back, the Lunar Chronicles is one of my absolute favourites series.

It spans over 4 books, (plus one novella (Fairest) and one anthology (Stars Above)) each of which is a different fairytale retelling. The books are all connected so that we are introduced to new characters while still following the previous set and they all meet up and it’s a grand time with action and banter and friendship and love!

Basically, it’s absolute magic

 

So, for the sake of comparison, this is what the original covers look like:

AND BELOW, ARE MY ATTEMPTS AT THE COVERS

✨ Pro: I was able to draw this in under 20 minutes and i’m really proud of myself for getting the proportions relatively right.

✨ Con: The colours I chose were definitely more dull compared to the original and the bone work,,,,,,,,,just awful.

✨ Pro: The cape took most of the time to get the shading and highlights right, but I’m really happy with how it turned out.

✨ Con: Again, the colours are very dull and monotone compared to the original cover’s. Will definitely try to focus more on stark contrasts when working with highlights and shadows to make it pop more.

✨ Pro: Hair is one of the HARDEST things for me to draw and while it’s definitely not perfect and I took HOURS working on this one I’m really proud of what I was able to accomplish and for not giving up when i wanted to SO MANY TIMES

✨ Con: The hair…..and the hand…..and the background. I feel like I missed out on the magical, sparkly element of the cover.

✨ Pro: Okay not to sound conceited, but I think I did a damn well good job on this one. Hands are SO HARD for me to draw and with all the neck pain it put me through, I’m really really happy with this outcome.

✨ Con: The glittery, magical feel is missing but overall, I don’t have much complaints on this.

 

 

I really don’t know why I went so hard on this set because it’s only setting the future ones up for MORE work and MORE disappointment but I promise that I will try harder to stick to a time frame rather than go on for hours tweaking every little detail.

Initially, I wanted it to be more like a “How well can I recreate this book cover in 30 minutes” but clearly, I threw that idea out the window and set it on fire, so none of that.

And there you have it, my attempts at recreating the book covers. I still don’t know what purpose this post serves. maybe if i had the foresight to somehow turn these into speedpaints and you got to see the whole progress of me recreating the artwork, it would be more entertaining???

but i don’t even know how to do that, so WHATEVER, im SHUTTING up now!!

 

So, now it’s YOUR turn, let me know your score /10 of each of my covers compared to the originals.

And tell me, have you read the lunar chronicles? Do you love and adore the series like me?

Thank you so much for reading, rating, and looking through this disaster. I appreciate you and I hope you’re staying safe and healthy during these scary times! ❤️