I saw this tweet saying "I'm gonna need adult science fiction / fantasy / horror books to start
putting in one third of the effort that smaller ya horror books do with their covers" and I saw
the covers and I was like um hi it's Divya G what does the g stand for? The g stands for GORGEOUS
but also wayament (wait a minute). Like anyone wanting to sort out their life,
I made a Pinterest board. So these are all the YA horror thriller novels from the past few
years where I thought they could be from the same family tree. The covers aren't the same
by any means, but they all have like this- there's a theme. PARTIAL Obscurity. Girls
partially obscured by fog, by bird, by water, by plants what's the monster of this horror?
Hay fever. But really why are they all covered in plants or have plants growing out of their skin?
Embarrassing Bodies mate that is an infection. One reason could be as Keetley puts it, is that
"plants embody the absolutely alien". He notes the Blair Witch Project where three filmmakers lost
in the woods and the woods themselves loom and become a nightmarish landscape. Nature is wild,
nature is unpredictable, nature can grow and infest. The way that the flowers envelop
the eyes in Horrid gives me a very disturbing feelings. It reminds me of Coraline's mother her
eyes replaced with two black buttons. Babes don't look at me like that. Sawkill girls also hides the
eyes with a 2010 Justin Bieber haircut. Eyes are often said to be the windows of the soul. We use
eyes to provide information about another person's emotional state, which is why it's
so unnerving when you can't see them. Partially due to it being also the uncanny valley,
where it looks almost human but it's not but also because we can't tell their true intentions.....
like okay Sia. I like to imagine the flowers is a connection to nature kind of like
decay or like funeral flowers but let's be real it's probably just for the aesthetic.The
cover for "you must not miss" reminds me of the movie Birds. Now, the pigeons in London
are gangster enough - I did not need to see this movie and see people getting ATTACKED. In new
Horror Thriller there's a lot of these trends of really nicely painted covers and a lot of
these are legit PENG. Anyway I'm not a mug and saying that I can make art like this
but i can make my own you know C-List version. First things first I'm the realest but also
find the pale girl who can rival Helen's tuberculosis in Jane Eyre - they have to be
pretty though. For this tutorial I use celebrities to inject humor into my otherwise bland life
but if you're doing this for real for a living and not like me, unemployed, only use celebrities for
partial reference like you want to reference like the eyes or like maybe the nose. I was looking up
Emma Chamberlain because she has those like big ass eyes and I noticed that these two covers look
really really similar. I kept on looking for that face that like a lot of artists use like they have
like same face syndrome and then I thought oh wait you know what the? Billie Eilish has that
sort of blank depressive big ass eyes dead stare thing going for her and I thought BRILLIANT. Oh
my god look she already has a tear coming out from how badly she's gonna be mistreated in this novel.
Pexels are like the gods for royalty-free images I also thought what's a scary bug?
Apart from all of them. Ladybugs. I put a few ladybugs crawling near her eyes, up her hair
because they might be a lady but they're still a bug. Just like Camilla who will never replace
Lady Diana (not the people's princess). At this point i was like there's a lot of vegetation but
the protagonist needs good eye health to be able to see the horrors and the monsters that's about
to unfold and [ __ ] so I thought: let's include a spring onion for the vitamin a.... also they taste
good in Asian dishes so you know representation(!) that publishers would be willing to publish. Gotta
sneak them in you know (like veggies) gotta sneak attack! Something was not feeling right with the
other flowers and I wanted to get the like "I have totally spent like 50 000 pounds on an art degree"
-except I haven't and I don't have these skills so I was like how can I fake this?
I got some oil paintings of some flowers that look like they live with South Asian parents
who constantly criticize them, kind of like it's their healing incantation that they need to recite
every day otherwise they're gonna lose their youth. Basically half wilted and look like me with
my crooked back and my crippling self esteem! You then arrange them around her face like you're
arranging flowers for her casket because she's probably gonna be dead or dying at one point
in there. Okay so girls with half of their face cut out looking like they've been put through the
spiralizer it's a trend not only in book covers but also photoshop Instagram. A whole bit didn't
record but basically i just sucked the life out of her face by reducing the temperature of the
photo and reducing the vibrancy of her life, her personality, and reducing the oranges and reds
to desaturate the image because you want to make it look like she's either a corpse
or she's suffering with severe anemia like every South Asian brown girl. I then added a shadow and
a vignette to emphasize the focal point and then using Photoshop's oil painter filter to
make it like oil painted. In terms of title you really want to figure this out before you even
start. You want the title and the photo to look good together it comes in a pair all right it
ain't about the individualistic life. And let me tell you a little secret I don't read horror books
so I took to twitter for help and Victoria was like "the widow locked under the stairs" which
works amazing for a series like imagine: the widow locked under the stairs book one, the widow locked
in the basement book two, the widow locked in the walls book three! And someone else said that
horror is kind of known for having elusive, iconic and vague singular word titles so you can see
there with "Horrid" or like "It". I tried "She"... I make this joke to like basically everybody that
I meet but I'm like this is why every brown girl's favorite marvel superhero is Iron Man
because they're anemic and they have low iron. My poor girl has not seen the light for so long that
they now have low iron, they've got pale sallow skin, and they also have a vitamin d deficiency...
d- for DIVYA ahaha hit that like, subscribe SMASH the bell button- For the title I added
some inner shadow and scratchy texture make it look like they've kind of clawed into this. I then
added some like line marks in there to make it look like they were counting down the days
until they can own their own home without generational wealth because that's the true
horror story of this country.... anyway here is the New York Times best selling NOVEL
not gonna lie i think it kind of slaps you know. One of my favorite hobbies is just like reading
your comments I find them so funny and it's just like comforting um because I have no comfort at
this point in my life I'm quite lonely. Always down to hear suggestions for more video recs or
whatever you want to say to me how was your day? How was your bowel movements? Was that good? Have
you done it today? If not you need to eat more fiber. Thank you for watching all the way to the
end let's hug because Asian families they don't show comfort like this I've got to
give it to you guys I'm wearing deodrant this time don't worry, oh how sweet yes here we go
that's enough- Follow my depression on twitter, follow my Instagram or my TikTok if you want.
Anyway thank you so much for watching I hope you all are doing Gucci and I'll see you guys
next time don't know when that is. You know, i haven't even had coffee today I don't know
where this energy is coming from right like just me alone.... i think it's sleep deprivation okay
okay i just oh my god