The Strange Egg: Cover, Title lettering and internal illustrations

I was commissioned by The Emma Press to work with author Kirstie Millar to produce a cover and internal illustrations for The Strange Egg. The Strange Egg is a luminous gothic prose poem that delves into the mythopoeic to express injustice at the hands of abusive medical systems.

Blurb: A woman is faced, month after month, with the birth of a strange egg. Her doctor asks that she take notes on her symptoms, documenting black blood clots as big as pennies, winking stars in her eyes, and relentless pain. As the woman waits for aid from her doctor, she begins to have strange premonitions of what will be done to her body. The egg, meanwhile, is watchful and demanding. Impatient. Kirstie Millar’s The Strange Egg is as gorgeous as it is horrifying. Highly original, it challenges long-held beliefs that people of marginalised genders are unreliable and irrational witnesses to our own bodies.

Scroll down to view the illustrations I created for the interior of the book!

The cover image features digitally-manipulated scans of hand-marbled paper adjusted to suit the colour palette of the book

The internal illustrations I created, used a limited colour palette of reds and combined rough, scratchy marks with marbled textures to evoke visceral feelings. It felt important for the images to feel somewhat dreamlike and frightening due to the hallucinatory and symbolic nature of elements of the narrative.

About the Author:

Kirstie Millar is a writer based in Manchester. In 2017 she founded Ache, an intersectional feminist press publishing writing and art on illness, health, bodies and pain. She completed her MA in Creative Writing at UEA and was a recipient of the Ink, Sweat and Tears Scholarship. Her writing has been published by Prototype, 3 of Cups Press and has been commended by Penguin’s WriteNow programme in 2020 and the UEA New Forms Awards in 2021.

You can find out more about the book on The Emma Press Website.

The title lettering I designed was inspired by a wood-carved alphabet from the 17th century.