VPRO summer covers

Dutch TV -and radio organization VPRO has an excellent reputation when it comes to good taste – watch their 3h long program ‘Zomergasten’ on a quiet  Sunday night-  so when they invited me to a subject-free series of artistic summer covers, I immediately wanted to make something summer-like, but of a somehow more dubious taste (popular and flashy with at least some typo in Brush Script; more Veronica-style as we knew it in our Spartan-Belgian old days without commercial TV). Other participating artists are Claire Harvey, Liza May Post, Ruud van Empel, Michael Newhouse & Eddy Varekamp.

My first attempt was inspired by the omnipresent Olympics, but I must admit I was still in holiday mode and was mainly busy cleaning up my computer, stuffed with files and elements for my latest picture book called ‘Otto at the Airport’ – that I managed to finish just before our summer break with only 5 days of delay! – and for which I made plenty of colorful, international animals (and their equally colorful, international suitcases). More about it in some post to come. Here you can see the build up of the final cover (takes some time).

In fact I already have some kind of a track record at VPRO’s. In ’95 they ordered a cover with the shortest briefing ever: something about ‘suntan’ (not ‘sultan’!). In those days, I still had plenty of good taste, but very few colors at my disposition. And even less paper : I painted this ‘omnikini’ sunbather with diluted ink on a piece of kraft paper of 10 by 10 (cm).

It gained me an ADCN-award (from the Art Directors Club Nederland) in 1996 and I made them another cover for the Olympics of that year in Atlanta (aka the Coca Cola games) of which any trace seem to have disappeared in my archives. Probably for the better, because I remember it was one of my first trials in the acrylic discipline….