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The Day

DECEMBER 5, 2012
Cover Image
Interior Image
These 2 pieces are for the Liberty magazine Nov/Dec 2012 issue. The feature story is about a proposed legislation in Europe requiring observance of Sunday as the day of rest.  You can read the story here
The growing European Sunday Alliance is made up of powerful lablor unions, , so-called civil society organizations and of course the Orthodox churches and many Lutheran churches. They believe a compulsary rest day is neccesary for the well being of Europeans' health, family and society. Their reasoning for picking "Sunday" as "the Day" is that most people already have day off on Sundays. 
The opposition of the movement argues that having Sunday as the Rest day would do more harm than good as it's a violation of  "Seperation of State and Church" and "democratic choices" . " Seventh-day Aventists...worship on Saturdays. Muslims, meanwhile, worship on Friday, and Islamhas become a sizable and powerful minority throughout Europe in recent times." 
The editor proposed a simple yet effective direction for the illustrations: a pleasant sun over a peaceful, rural European landscape for the cover;  a threatening sun with the all seeing eye over the same landscape for the interior. 
I had a pretty clear idea of how I want to approach the cover but was toying with different possibilities with the interior. What if the all-seeing eye sun is casting a shadow over the landscape instead of brightening the day? Or appearing among stormy clouds? Or a laser beam shooting out from the eye and burning the houses (what was I thinking?)...
AD Bryant liked the stormy cloud and made a great suggestion that maybe the sun rays could look like the hair of the above illustration which I did for NYTimes mutual fund quarterly cover a while back.  
And here is what the final looks like in action. Great thanks to AD Bryan!
© 2024 Victo Ngai