Stone Giants, Will o' the wisps, Minusculi and Night Alfs

Here are some doodles for the first characters in Fantasia. After Bastian steals the book from mr. Koreander he reads about the meeting of these creatures in the forest. They're all on their way to the Ivory tower to tell the Childlike Empress about the Nothing.
I have a pretty clear idea about the first illustration I'm going to make (the wednesday in the third week of may), but I blame Sam Bosma for making me want to sketch more. He puts so much effort into development, I was actually convinced it might be a good idea to not go with my first gut feeling.
Oh well, I can't say it wasn't a good idea.
So blame might have been a bad choice of words.

Stone Giants, Will o' the wisps, Minusculi and Night Alfs.

Yokai party

This is a part out of a quite larger drawing made for the Fieperdepiep magazine.
This one took rather a lot of time to make, though I have to say it was educational. Fortunately I had been wanting to make a drawing with japanese monsters for ages, so it was loads of fun to do as well.

I'll post the entire drawing when the magazine comes out.

A Picture book report

Finally after a grueling ten days or so I can make this announcement. Starting next month I'll be illustrating The Never ending Story, one of my absolute favourite books, over on www.picturebookreport.com.
This wonderful project was started by Meg Hunt an illustrator in Arizona with a veritable slew of talented people, like Sam Bosma, Laura Park
, Israel Sanchez, Kali Ciesemier, all illustrating one of their favourite books. Unfortunately S. Britt, one of the participators, had to step down, because he wanted to pursue a personal project full time. A great shame as his work so far has been stellar.
But at least this means we'll probably get something even more fantastic from him.

However he asked me to take over his spot on the site, something I was of course keen to do. Who doesn't want a chance to illustrate any book of their choosing simply for the joy of it?
Naturally, choosing which book to illustrate was very hard. There are just so many that I can think of images for, or at which I would leap at the chance to do something with them. The Wind in the Willows, Ronia the Robber's daughter, Gormenghast, The Black Cauldron, De brief voor de koning, Erik of het Klein insecten boek, The Brothers
Lionheart, suffice it to say it was a long list.
But when I thought of The Never ending Story it seemed almost obvious. It hasn't really been illustrated before, so apart from an atrocious film from the eighties, there were no previous visuals to go up against.
The Wind in the Willows has E.H. Shepard already, that's a comparison I don't feel I would come out looking very good.

Now of course I have to come up with an actual approach for the whole thing. I decided to step into this because I had been looking for some personal project to sink my teeth in while in between commissioned work. I've also been wanting the push myself in some new directions, as I feel that lately my work has been going a little stale. Or rather my development had stagnated a bit. I've never been busier the past month. I've learned a lot and gained new confidence in what I make, but it had been at the cost of doing new things a bit. So this is something I'm looking forward to a lot,
and I'm very grateful for S. and Meg for giving me the opportunity.

In other news, there's lots of new work I'll be posting soon and in a few months I hope to be moving to Oregon so I can be with my fiancee, though that won't happen untill the fall.