This year our christmas card was inspired by an interior  painting of a red room that I made last year during the summer.  I used good old photoshop to give the room a christmas makeover. Even the old twikga christmas tree came down from the attic . I designed that tree for my very first christmas card in 2009, when I was working on my first Phanhabs book, Lush Bush.

The Phanhabs Night Hide card and the two years before that  were New Phantastic Habitats. The Phanhabs books were published by twikga Verlag in 2010 and 2013. Phanhabs stands for “phantastic habitats”, creative impressions of the habitats of wild African animals. The illustrations are a mix of photographs, drawings and collages. More information about the making of the books on stories…

Sinds een half jaar ga ik elke woensdag tekenen en schilderen bij Artiance. Déjà vu? Ja! Het herinnert mij aan de beginjaren in Hamburg en aan de Akademie. Maar sindsdien is er zo veel gebeurd. Ik heb dit verhaal door de jaren heen al zo vaak verteld. Wellicht is het tijd om het achter mij te laten. Daarom zet ik het hier nog eens online. Dan hoeft ik het zelf niet meer te vertellen.

Ruim 20 jaar geleden vertrokken we naar Hamburg voor Willem zijn werk. Mijn eigen carrière was voor mijn gevoel te ver weggeraakt van wat ik écht leuk vond. Ik verdiende goed met het verkopen van ideeën waar ik niet in geloofde. Dus Hamburg was voor mij een mogelijkheid tot heroriëntatie. Voordat ik het wist was ik creatief in de weer bij de Volkshochschule. Mensen zagen mijn werk en vonden dat ik daar iets mee moest gaan doen. Néén, dacht ik, dat was niet het plan. Daarvoor nam ik mijzelf en mijn carrière té serieus. Maar het zaadje was geplant…

Yet another Christmas Phanhabs inspired by our recent visit to several hides in Kenya. From underground hides we were able to take pictures on eye-level observe night time behaviour. Your can get very close to the animals because your are behind glass and they do not realize that you are watching them. Like in all of my Phanhabs the animals were not in the same place at the same time. To illustrate this I added some of the single shots that were used to create the phantasy.

Making this Phanhabs brings back fond memories of making the Phanhabs books. They were published by twikga Verlag in 2010 and 2013. Phanhabs stands for “phantastic habitats”, creative impressions of the habitats of wild African animals. The illustrations are a mix of photographs, drawings and collages. More information about the making of the books on stories…

It feels good to publish something on paper again, even if these are just christmas cards. The Phantastic Habitats I used to decorate our seasons greetings were inspired by safaris to Manapools in 2022 and the Serengeti this summer.

Making these new Phanhabs brings back fond memories of making the Phanhabs books. They were published by twikga Verlag in 2010 and 2013. Phanhabs stands for “phantastic habitats”, creative impressions of the habitats of wild African animals. The illustrations are a mix of photographs, drawings and collages. The pictures were taken during our safaris in Africa. The landscapes and animals were photographed and combined with patterns made on paper and drawings. All the elements were merged in photoshop. More information about the making of the books on stories…

Das Thema der IFUPA 2022 war BUCH, Überarbeitungen-Memoiren-Utopien. Das twikga BUCH-abenteuer hat fast 10 Jahre gedauert. Inzwischen sind wir nach Holland zurückgezogen. Den twikga Verlag gibt es nicht mehr. Aber die Illustrationen von Tanja Dekker leben fort auf twikga.com Phanhabs Lush Bush war das erste WimmelBUCH was twikga veröffentlicht hat. Für die Postkarte habe ich es überartbeitet und meinen utopischen Power Ladies überlassen…

IFUPA stands for Internationale-Foto-Unikat-Postkarten-Aktion. It is a yearly event, which has been organized by Carmen Oberst from het PHOTO.KUNST.RAUM in Hamburg since 1995. The participants create unique postcards around a predefined theme in their own creative technique and send them to the other participants. Everybody collects the postcards and sends them back to Carmen, who organizes a SORTIERPERFORMANCE where all the postcards are sorted and the public chooses the winner. There is a yearly exhibition with the winning cards and a catalogue. I have participated in several of the postcard using my collage technique. Some of my postcards to the themes animals, music, vehicles, clothes and buildings can be seen in my portfolio. 

Finally, after 5 years I have my own creative workspace again. Moving countries, building a house, getting settled took time and crowded my head. Maybe the lockdown gave me the peace of mind to unpack the boxes which were still in our cellar. I still do not have the peace of mind or inspiration to create really new things, but for now it is great to just get my fingers dirty again. It was great to rediscover paints and pens. Colorful treasures waiting to be used again.

In 2016 the twikga publishing company was closed down and we thanked our fans for supporting us. In 2017 we moved from Hamburg back to Holland. In took some time to build and get settled into our new house. I used the corona lockdown to go through my archives, to evaluate where we stand and to redesign our websites. The twikga name now stands for the illustrations of Tanja Dekker and the heritage of the twikga books.  I am looking forward to illustrating again. A lot of my work is a mix of photographs, drawings and collages. Due to the lockdown we cannot travel, so things are on hold in terms of getting fresh material for wildlife collages. So for now I am focussing on magazine collages and other work close to home. But we will see what the future will bring.

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 story around the three birds was more than ten years ago. They decorated a birthday card for a very special person in my life who had a tiny white dog. Later I introduced our dog Duvel to his three imaginary bird friends since then Duvel and the 3irds have been up to a lot of mischief together. Curious? Have a look at the stories of The 3irds…

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 were valuable input for our work. But the little plastic elephant had to do some posing for me as well. Elisabeth Visser was working on the storyline in Amsterdam and I created the visuals in Hamburg. Now and then we met to brainstorm or we used Skype to talk face to face. The illustrations are a creative mix of photographies, drawings and collages. I loved that stage of the creative process, because all the options were still open. What would Tata wear? How would the “lead-elphant” look like? Which scenes of the story were we going to illustrate? The creative team was back on the drawing board…

Tata&Squack – Mission Elephant was published in 2014. For more information about the book, have a look in the portfolio of  Tata&Squack books…

Abschied von Irene. Es fällt mir schwer. Nach mehr als 10 Jahren trennen sich unsere Wege. Ich kam in 2004 zu Irene zur Mappenvorbereitung für mein Studium an der Bildkunst Akademie.

Nach meinem Studium war sie mein Creatives Gewissen bei dem Entstehen der Bücher. Später habe ich bei Ihr an meinen Collagen gearbeitet. Viele Montage habe ich zusammen mit verschiedenen creatieven Mitstreitern in der Malschule Ottensen verbracht. Jeder hat an seinen eigenen Projecten gearbeitet und die anderen inspiriert. Es gab immer eine gemütliche Kaffeerunde zu der es immer etwas Mitgebrachtes von den Schülern gab. Zum Abschied gab es ein Glas Sekt.

Es war schön mit Euch! Vielen Lieben Dank Irene!