Van Dale Junior Dictionary

For HarperCollins I am working on a series of illustrations.

The kind of illustrations reminds me at project I've done before and worked on it for ten years (intervals included!). The project was about to draw over 10.000 unique images for a dictionary, called The Van Dale Junior Dictionary for Ambrasoft and Noordhoff publishers.

Together with my great friend Jos van den Langkruis, we started in 2002 with the job. Unfortunately Jos died in 2011 and I finished the job with my other great friend Jamel Armand in 2012.
Below are some of the 10,000 images that we have made in the period 2002-2012 for the Van Dale Junior dictionary.

Girl with bird and boy with whale

Last week I made two drawings to try out some techniques. Each drawing was made in about four hours.
At the first picture you see a girl and a bird.

Should you work with a colored outline, as above, or with a black outline usually depends on the picture as a whole. Below is the same design, but with a black outline. I have no clear preference ...

First I worked out the complete background in detail and then put a blur over it. Below the drawing without blur.

And some sketches ...

In the second picture you see a boy and a whale.

In this drawing I wanted to try some brushes. And also look at the light effects it in the drawing. Hereafter some sketches.

What I made the last couple of months...

The past few months I worked on many different projects. In this blog I will show some recent illustrations I made. In the case that material has not been published, I just show the sketches.

Each year, my great agent, Advocate Art provides a calendar for its clients and potential clients. This is my contribution.

Before I came to this drawing, I first had some other ideas...

... then I came up with some sketches... 

...made the final and now the result speaks for itself! My contribution is contained in a voluminous calendar full of beautiful work of the talented illustrators of Advocate Art!

For Oxford University Press, South Africa I made illustrations for a couple of stories. The ones below I did during the summer of 2014. In recent weeks (winter 2014) I did some stories more and I will show them early next year.

I completed a book for Benchmark Education Publishers of New York written by the American children's author Lori Mortensen. For now I can only show you some sketches.

For Identity Games of Rotterdam, Holland, I made some sketches and drawings for a children's book.

For Igloo Books (England) I made an illustration for a pitch. It didn't quite made it, but I'm satisfied with the result.

For publishing company Kwintessens (Holland) I made some drawings that will be published in spring 2015. These are two sketches.

Also for publishing company Kwintessens, I'm working on a big project. The following drawings are animated by Tom Verweij of www.tommotion.nl

Currently I am working on sketches for two books. The first book is for Hometown World Publishers off England. The book is about a boy, Jack, and he likes rugby.

The second book is a children's book for Clean Slate Press from New Zealand. The book is a classic story told again. It is a story set in Korea and is about a tiger that has fallen into a pit. In the next blog I can show some sketches of these books..