Happy Holidays!

Is what terrorists say; Merry Christmas from me!

A night among polar bears

As previously mentioned here are some of the illustrations for the last book I did for the striped books series. As the series progresses along with the readers this book was for kids of about ten. So the story is slightly more mature than the one I did last year. Instead of a guinea pig saving some kidnapped kids this one is about an Inuit boy who winds up marooned for a night on an iceberg where he's forced to shoot a mother polar bear (!).

New book!

This arrived today, all the way from the Netherlands. It's the last striped book I illustrated. In fact I only completed it late october, I was rather later than I should have been because I was trying to finish another assignment and then I was very busy because I moved to the United States in october as well.
Then I was late another week because I had to spend a week in the hospital. It was rather a nuisance. But despite not having eaten for days and with numerous tubes going in and coming out of me I managed to finish it.

I'll do a blog post tomorrow about the actual illustrations.

From the archives again.

Just a fat pinguin I did for my friend Marije's site Dikkepinguin.nl

From the archives

And by archives I mean giant pile of paper sitting in an old suitcase of course.
This is a drawing I made for an illustration I never finished a couple of years ago. It was for a news paper in the Netherlands. They were doing a weekly feature on their children's page where they had an illustrator making pictures for poems. I was actually the first to do it, and it was quite a fun job.
This one however got the better of me, I couldn't get the colours to work and a day before the deadline I had a different idea that worked out much better than my initial drawing ever would have.
This is one that was published.

Boekie boekie -Catching up part 7 (!)

Here's an illustration I did over the summer for Boekie boekie magazine. It's for a story by Anna Woltz called The secret of the Ice cellar. It was part of Boekie boekie's special 'Castle Groeneveld' number. Everything in it had something to do with the castle.
Like this comic by Jeroen Funke from Lamelos: http://www.lamelos.nl/weblog/2010/12/09/victor-vishnu-en-het-spookkasteel-huuuuu/

This drawing was quite a pain. I never got the foliage to look right (it still isn't quite what it should be), and it turned out my screen wasn't calibrated properly so it took forever to get the colours and the contrasts looking acceptable.
Then they told me that the size wasn't entirely right and I needed to shift everything around.
By the time I was finished I could have illustrated a small book. Twice.

As you can see the top version looks somewhat different from the one below. These two are still the original versions, before the size had to be altered. But between the messing with contrast and colour profiles, I really lost track of which version I prefer.
Probably it's the one that's inside my head and which the ones on my screen will never quite match.

My name is Hare - Catching up part 6

I drew the brush, the paint can and the daubs of paint here. Oh my!


Over the summer and start of this autumn I worked as assistant illustrator on a computer game for children. Something I'd never done before.
The game was called Mijn naam is Haas (My name is Hare). There were already several games about Haas on the market, all of them about an inquisitive Hare and his animal friends. They're designed to help young children increase their vocabularies, and they were making a new game.

I was asked because of the similarity between my work and that of their original illustrator: Wouter Tulp. He had already designed the characters, defined the style for the most part and loads of objects used in the game. However he wanted to devote more time to other projects, so I was asked to take over some of his duties.
And since this was something I'd never done before I thought it might be worth a try.

I worked three days a week in Amsterdam at the studio, where I had the pleasure of seeing my drawings immediately handed over to the animators who set to work on getting it in motion.
In the three months I worked there I drew an incredible amount of things, some of them trivial, but most of them rather fun. I've always enjoyed drawing plants, and that was a large part of what I got to do.
In the game the player gets to shape the landscape the story is taking place in, so many objects and props were required for that. Under the guidance of the Art director Daan Velsink I set to work on those.
Below is a large collection of those things.

As much as this was a job of subsuming my ego and adapting my style and work to the requirements of the game, it was made more than worth it by the pleasure of working with a group of wonderful and dedicated people and of course by seeing my own drawings come to life in the actual game!



ps. Needless to say the copyright of this lies firmly with me and Mijn naam is Haas.

The Little Leaf ~ Catching up part 5

These are some of the illustrations for a new book in the 'Little Striped Book' series. As opposed to the books I've previously illustrated in the series, which were for kids who were starting to learn to read, this one was for (even) younger children. So I had to adopt a style that was suitable for that. I'm not sure I really changed that much, the requirements of the story put these illustrations firmly in a child friendly-zone, what with the talking leafs and all.

To make up for it I promise that the illustrations I did for the next striped book are appropriately more butch and gruesome. But seeing as how I finished the last book in april and it didn't come out until just now, I won't be able to show much for a while at least.









As always you can purchase the Little Striped Books from their site: www.degestreepteboekjes.nl