2012 is not only a leap year (and an Olympic one), but also an official ‘Grimm’-year. The brother’s First Publication Ever, saw the light in 1812 and today we found a collection of Grimm-interpreted-fairy-tales bundled by fine Flemisch editor Lannoo in our mailbox From next week of in a bookstore near you. In Dutch.
The editor also selected a bunch of young & old, Flemish & Dutch -but all alive & kicking- illustrators to translate these well known stories into images. The very elegant cover is by Dutch Noëlle Smit, while I chose to stick to Snow White (since I had very little time and I had already illustrated ‘the mother of all fairy tales’ once upon a time for Spanish-Catalan editor La Galera).
It somehow gave me ‘l’embarras du choix’ to have a whole picture book to choose from, but most of the images didn’t really work in the new context or even felt outdated -after 15 years, only the errors seem to remain to me- and of course the old book was square and this new one vertical…
So -overnight and with a little help of two whistling dwarfs (aka Photo & Shop)-, I added some background to change the proportions and added a few more things to make the illustrations look more ‘New-School-Tom’ (aka ‘headachingly-stuffed-and-sometimes-all-the-way-over-the-top’).
But the story kept it’s happy ending and it’s exotic prince from my First Picture Book Ever. (Check the BOOKS-section on this site, all the way down the booktower)
