May 12th, 2014

Again I’ve been too quiet for my own (blogging-) good. Last month I was totally occupied by
the Lemniscaat illustration contest. Literally every moment I could spend drawing, I did.
As a child I always dreamed of illustrating children’s- and mostly fairytale books but I
never actually made any attempts to do so.

Illustrators were asked by publisher Lemniscaat to send in three illustrations that go with a
story of their own choice. It was clear to me it had to be a fairytale but which one? I chose a
story from ‘Persian Fairytales’ by Arthur Christensen (original title: Persische Märchen).
My dad used to read from them when I was little and after all the stories by Grimm and
ndersen they were amazingly refreshing. These stories had all this different creatures and
different magic and lots of blood and gore! My choice fell upon ‘Mohammed the shepherd and
the three Peri princesses’.

From beginning to end it took me almost 20 days to finish all three illustrations and I was
just in time for the (Dutch) closing date on May 1^st! It took me this long because I had to take
some really hard hurdles that housed in my brain. Now that I have returned to my ‘regular’
drawings I can feel a difference in the way I work. I just DO because when working on the
illustrations there was no time to ponder every brushstroke, they had to be finished and soon!
So I’m very happy with this change and much happier to go to my studio.

Sure I would like to win the contest, sure I would like to be among the 10 best and attend a
master class by an internationally recognized illustrator. I would like having my work
promoted during the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. Have my work exhibited in library ‘The
Hive’, in Worcester, England, in the Shanghai Library, China and also in the Centrale
Bibliotheek Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

I would like all these things very much but taking these personal hurdles was very important to me.
Winning or losing I’m very happy I participated!

Below details from the three illustrations I did for the Lemniscaat contest.