Today, as I was sitting googling what the white flowers in The Time Machine might have possibly been and looked like to help me draw them in my designs, I came up with another potential idea…

Flower preserving!…

The images of the dead “white withered flowers” that google produced for me reminded me of a prom corsage that I attempted to preserve 15 years ago.. it then made me think that flower preserving is actually an old Victorian pastime! (another link!) I then had the idea in my head of a photographic book cover of 2 preserved white flowers possibly on a mottled, textured background to give the book an old feel, (In Victorian times flowers were preserved onto silk) and then some simplistic typography for the title and author. This design would show how in the story the flowers are fragile and delicate and show a sense of love and kindness.

In Victorian times flower preserving was a popular pastime but it was also a way to collect, record and study different species of flowers. Botany is the study of plants and flowers. This brings the science link into the designs too.

The images above are just a few I found of flower preserving examples.

When I was sketching ideas and writing notes for this, some books came to mind that I read when I was younger.. I had a whole set of Beatrix Potter classics (I think they belonged to my mum) The typography style that features on them is something similar that I would envision for this design. The layout of the books and the texture is something that I would want to take inspiration from.

I think that if I successfully designed and created this cover as I imagine it, it would be a beautiful work of art as well as work as a timeless classic.

From doing earlier research (Chipp Kidd’s video) He mentioned that classic books are usually covered in plastic to protect them and to also keep their value… I then thought about placing the preserved white flowers onto my mottled backdrop and then covering them in plastic and photographing it..

These are the Beatrix Potter ones that came to mind! The stories are classics and the book covers are standing the test of time (I think they have been reused and modernised on reprints of these books in recent years..) The covers here are hardback but the idea behind it is still the same for both hardback and paperback.

How could I make the other 2 covers similar to this design?

• The Time Machine – Would have the preserved flowers
• Ann Veronica – possibly a photo of a frog or a scientific drawing of a dissected frog
• Tono-Bungay – Maybe an old medicine bottle on its side with some coloured liquid pouring out onto the page…

These are just some ideas that I can explore and further look into… I might have a go at preserving 2 white flowers which I could potentially use for a design.

**update 12/11/2019

I did some more sketchbook ideas last night (see below), trying to problem solve around the ideas I have to make them work (I started drawing out a mock sketch for the bell jar idea and I am not sure of it!..)

so I looked back at the flowers idea. I found some images that gave me some inspiration; they were mostly of x-rayed flowers, (obviously I cannot x-ray some flowers myself!) I could use this idea though to maybe draw a similar idea in pencil to get the delicacy needed… or I also looked into scanography, which is simply put – Scanner art!