Urban Jungle

The collages below were not meant to be about corona and being locked up in an urban jungle. But maybe they reflect how I feel about all being confined to our own small world which is slowly starting to open up again. We are starting to plan our first photographic trip to Kenya after two years and four cancellations. So time to dream again about magic light, amazing landscapes and wild animals.

Stories about our travels can be found on Wild Picha Stories.

Sketchbook birds

Birds can be big, small, ugly, beautiful, funny, scared and scary. To illustrate them you need to study them, even if they will be phantasy birds. How they are “constructed”, their proportions, their silhouettes, how they fly. Then comes the question of technique. How to visualize feathers, textures and coloring in your own creative style. I prefer using collages of drawings, patterns and elements I develop along the way.

Our websites

Wild Picha is the website for photography by Willem and Tanja Dekker. Our travel galleries can be found under the tab Stories. The twikga website belonged to the twikga publishing company which was founded by Tanja Dekker in Hamburg in 2010. In 2016 we decided to move back to Holland and the company ceased to exist. The twikga name now stands for the illustrations of Tanja Dekker and the heritage of the twikga books. The twikga blog can now be found under twikga Stories.

Sketchbook Mission Elephant

For our elephant book I did a lot of studies on the anatomy of elephants. Their proportions and how they walk. How to bring across their amazing wrinkly skin in an illustration? For Tata I developed a new outfit. The same old scruffy look but still different from the last book. For all my books I develop color themes and patterns. These I use to give landscapes and vegetation the same look and feel across the book.

Ikga twikga has found a new home on twikga stories. Ikga twikga was the blog of the twikga publishing company in Hamburg from 2010 until 2016, when the company seized to exist and Tanja and Willem decided to move back to Holland. The content of the blog was very precious to everybody who had worked on the twikga books. It was a kind of “logbook” of the making of the books, the illustrations, the writing, going to the Childrens Book Fair in Bologna, all the publicity we got. So I was shocked to find out that the blog had been hacked going as far back as 2014 and that content had been added which was not very “child friendly”. My first emotional reaction was to shut everything down and delete the blog. Now I am happy I did not choose that route. 

After some research I found out that WordPress blogs are often hacked and that there are a lot of companies who are offering products to clean your site and protect it from harm. So that is what I did back in 2016. The attacks did not stop though. The difference being that I could now monitor what happened and protective measures were keeping the bad guys out. Meanwhile Google had blacklisted the old blog. For a few years nothing much happened.

A fresh start was called for, so when we started to redesign our websites in 2020 I decide to move the clean content to a new site, to twikga stories. This turned out to be a tedious job. A lot of the images were old and not big enough for the new screens. But I hope that the layout somewhat compensates this and that the sentimental value will do the rest.

Na ruim 25 jaar kwamen we terug naar de kust en het dorp waar we zo veel goede jeugd-herinneringen aan hebben. Willem en ik kennen elkaar al sinds de middelbare school tijd. We zijn beiden in Noord Holland opgegroeid. Na ons eindexamen wisten we niet hoe snel we hier weg moesten komen. Ik ging studeren in Zwitserland, later in Rotterdam. Daarna hebben we samen een wereldreis gemaakt. We gingen werken en verhuisden naar Hamburg. Nu, ruim 25 jaar later kwamen we graag terug naar de kust, de zee en het dorp waar we zo veel goede jeugd-herinneringen aan hebben. De lange zomers op het strand. Koffie drinken op terrasjes, de lampionnen-avond in Augustus. Spijbelen bij Nero. Dansen bij de Rainbow. Af en toe zie ik de oude schoolfoto’s van de Europese School op facebook langskomen. Wat een onschuldige tijd. En wat is er sindsdien veel gebeurd. Wie had gedacht dat we zo veel van de wereld zouden gaan zien en dat we nu maar wat graag terug naar de kust zouden willen komen.

The twikga publishing company seized to exist, but while it lasted we did great things! I would like to thank everybody who helped me realize this creative adventure. Thank you all for the hard work and the good times!

My special thanks go to my husband Willem. Not only did you support my publishing ambitions business wise, you also helped me to take the pictures I needed to make my illustrations. For my artwork, I need pictures of landscapes, trees, patterns and animals in all kinds of light, settings and positions. Normally wildlife photographers delete these kind of pictures. We still have discussions about what to keep. When I worked on my first book back in 2007 it was not a given that we would both come to like photography as much as we do now. It is great to be out in the bush together as a team.

Elsbeth, we met shortly after we moved to Hamburg in 2003. You welcomed us with sekt and fresh strawberries. Since then I have learnt to know you as somebody who is social, caring and a bon vivant even if life has not always dealt you the best cards. Thank you so much for your endurance and your patience on our journey together as creative team. Thank you for writing the Tata & Squack books, for going to Africa and Bologna with me and for all your efforts on the marketing side. Although we have had our differences, I would not have been able to do all this without you. I wish you lots of succes with the book you are currently writing!

Last but not least, asante sana for everything you did for us Squack! You are a great safari guide and a very special friend. We first met you on our honeymoon in 1999, when you were guiding out of a lodge in Zimbabwe. Since then we have been on many safaris together and you have taught us a lot about wildlife photography. You helped us to find the right locations to get the pictures I needed for the books. We would not have been able to manage without you. Thank you Squack!

Gestern war der Andruck von Tata&Squack – Mission Elefant, immer wieder ein spannender Moment. Obwohl es Farbproben gibt, liegt mir viel an der persönlichen Abstimmung der Farben mit den Meistern an der Druckmaschine. Ein Glück sind diese sehr professionell und haben ein offenes Ohr für die Wünsche der Illustratorin. Die Farben für ein Kinderbuch müssen kräftig sein, aber für Afrika dürfen sie nicht zu blau sein, das Gelb sollte nicht zu grell sein und das Rot der Erde von Samburu sollte Wärme ausstrahlen. Die ersten Bögen, die aus der Maschine kamen sahen gut aus und wir freuen uns schon jetzt auf das fertige Buch. Nach mehr als einem Jahr harter Arbeit wird das zweite Abenteuer von Tata&Squack tastbar. Am Anfang stand unsere Reise in den Samburu Nationalpark in Kenia. Die Erfahrungen die wir dort gesammelt haben mit den von der Erde rot gefärbten sanften Riesen, haben Elisabeth und mich inspiriert zu dieser Geschichte. Wir hoffen, mit diesem Buch auf kinderfreundliche Art und Weise Aufmerksamkeit für den Elefanten zu wecken und einen Beitrag zu leisten, um diese großartigen Tiere vor dem Aussterben zu bewahren. Zu dieser Mission gibt es bald mehr Informationen auf dieser Seite. Erst mal freuen wir uns, daß das Buch jetzt gedruckt wird und wir es im März mit auf die Kinderbuchmesse nach Bologna nehmen können.