Colour taste and cover versions

The new cover designs for The Horsepower Whisperer and The Wormton Lamb are coming on. Although I would have preferred to have finished them both by now, I'm enjoying myself. I haven't indulged in painting with oils or gouache since I was at Falmouth School of Art. I'd forgotten how much I like the smell of turpentine and the feeling of the paint on the brush.

I've forgotten a lot about technique but the most striking thing of all to come back to me is that profound sense of peace when I'm focussed on painting. It's taken a little while to return. I was hurrying too much to start with, treating the materials as if I was familiar with them and in control. I've been using sprit markers for year but they seem a bit unsubtle for illustrations, although fine for renderings of cars or motorbikes.

Another thing that's come back to me is how awful green tastes. If I'm doing a wash, inevitably I lick my paintbrush if it's too wet or carries too much colour. I now associate all colours with a bad taste in the mouth and green is my least favourite. The taste of green has changed. The watercolour taste of green used to be the taste that the smell of a chemical toilet suggested. Nowadays it's another nasty taste, no better or worse, just different. It's probably better for me. I've never heard of anyone dying from suspected green poisoning but having lasted this long I don't want to succumb from to it until my work is better known. Posthumous fame doesn't appeal.

Licking your paintbrush just isn't a problem with oils. I don't like the smell of turps that much.

As a child I used to wonder why they didn't make paints taste pleasant. I've concluded it's deliberate. At primary school there was a craze for raspberry or strawberry scented rubbers and they proved surprisingly appetising. Of course, somebody overindulged. There's always one. It wasn't me. Raspberry and strawberry flavoured rubbers were banned immediately but I can't rememeber if, at around the same time, paint boxes became unpalatte-able(!).

I've just re-read that last paragraph and realised that perhaps I should have used the term eraser instead of rubber but I'll leave it as it is.

Many years ago, in an episode of The Magic Roundabout, Brian the Snail found a paintbox and mistook them for sweets. He ate the lot and spent the whole episode feeling very ill. I still wonder what his snail trail must have looked like afterwards. A rainbow?

Whilst re-exploring the sensory associations of colour, I tried alternative layouts for my cover designs. I wanted my book cover template to match the look of my website. It was the re-vamped website that prompted this cove re-design in the first place. In the end I've gone for something similar to the originals.

I've made the go faster stripes smaller but kept the chequer strip. The drawings will now be portrait format because in landscape they create a lot of dead space. They will also be drawn out and painted on A3 sized paper and scanned in on my sparkly new A3 scanner. This should make them look far slicker. And my name will be at the top rather than the title because I am the brand instead of the book.

I've also given a lot more thought to how later titles will look. Actually, I hadn't considered this before. I hope to avoid any awkward formatting problems with a suitably flexible layout that anticipates their cover illustrations and the size of their titles.

I still haven't settle on the medium for the illustrations yet. So far I've dabbled in marker pens, pastels (or chalks to our American cousins), oils, water colour, gouache, colouring pencils and acrylic inks. These last weeks have been multi-media experiences but I wouldn't say that entirely comfortable with any of them. Marker pens are probably my favourite medium but the more illustrations that I do, as opposed to renerings, the more I feel drawn to gouache. With a bit of Acrylic ink squirted in for good measure.