The corona lockdown gave me the chance to go through my archives and look back on what I have created during the last 10 years. I realized that I have been making phantasy birds for a long time. Birds are everywhere. You see them in your backyard, they wake you on an early spring morning. That makes them easy to study. They are great to create and tell stories with. The first time I created a...
This story goes back to 2013. The making of the last twikga book, Tata & Squack - Mission Elephant. Only recently I went through my old sketchbooks and decided to add some of the pages to this post. For more sketchbook galleries have a look under the tag Sketchbook... The making of the next Tata&Squack was in full progress. The pictures we took during our visit to Samburu, Kenya in 2012...
In early 2008 we started to develop the story of Tata&Squack - The Big Journey and the characters in word and in design. Questions had to be answered: what would we like her to wear, which colors, what kind of body-lanquage do we want her to display in the illustrations. This development process I loved tremendously; the creation of something new. It took more than a few brainstorms to...
Squack is more than a little chubby creature on a key chain. In the book Tata&Squack the Big Journey, he becomes Tata's friend. Tata's parents are researchers, who studied the migration of the Wildebeest in the Serengeti. When their assignment is over and they fly back home Tata is sad. The flight attendant passes by with a basket full of toys. She picks Squack. Suddenly out of a magic swirl...
