Art for YA debut, SACRED

            While I was "toiling away" for the Halloween party, I was marinating on a project I’d signed up for months ago – an art piece illustrating a scene from a fellow YA writer’s debut novel, SACRED. 

            She had sent me an e-ARC months earlier, and I had chosen the passage I wanted to illustrate, but after a few frustrating tries at sketching the scene, I’d put it to my subconscious to come up with the solution. And so it did, although I’m not sure my technical skills were up to the task at hand.  It was one of my few attempts at a nighttime scene, and I was really interested in developing the effects of the different light sources. This of course gave me a choice about preordaining the brightest points of light, or figuring it out later using the screen or dodge tools in Photoshop. Those lightening tools can sometimes have a heavy-handed effect, and I’m not sure the distortion of the gazebo really worked – it might just look crooked. I am not sure if the two figures are convincing as teens, but it’s hard because they are dressed up for prom, and some kids do look like adults when they’re gussied up like that. Nevertheless, I received a decent response to it and it was, as always, a good experience for me. I got to be interviewed on her blog and it was fun to be a guest somewhere else (it gets pretty lonely around this here blog, just me and the tumbleweeds ;).