Saving Daylight – cover design & illustration

I’m delighted to have been asked to create the cover for Saving Daylight issue 2 cover. It’s a wonderful project by Clare Fuller. “Stir Crazy” issue features poetry, visual art, and photography from artists around the world about how they’ve dealt with their cabin fever and seasonal depression during a pandemic.

When designing this cover I was thinking about things, animals and plants which react to the sunlight, or lack of it. During a quiet winter evening staring at my house plants, I read that late chrysanthemum only develop their flowers when they have less than 8h of daylight per day. My plant is obviously in exactly the right place, as the sun gracefully forgets about us in Scotland in the winter. With the leaves, I was thinking about the way that I start seeing faces in patterns when life around me gets quiet. They are sleeping like dormant plants. I like that they are all connected to a gloriously flowering plant, which looks a bit like the sun. Looking at it now, it also reminds me of the short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but that is, perhaps, a darker reference…