De Boom die het Bos wilde zien

In January 2025, I got an email.

'We have a dream.

To create a children's book.

We have an idea.

A night in the woods.

A thrilling book for elementary and middle school.

In beautiful blue tones, with bright yellow accents.

Printed with flow-in-the-dark ink, so children can charge their book by the lamp.

And then fall asleep with a starry sky. The eyes of a fox. Fireflies. The moon.'

If emails begin like that, how can I ever say no?

This was a long project, from start to finish, and a lot of things changed along the way. But I was happy to join the team of Toffey to work on this children's book. I've worked with them before: I was the second illustrator in their Poster Scouts project back in 2021, and I created owner Nino's wedding invitation in 2023. They're always the nicest people to work with, even inviting their freelancers on their overnight team outing! Working with them is always such a joy.

Our client was Stadsbos013, the forest of Tilburg, a city in the south of the Netherlands and the homebase of Toffey. Their goal was simple: to lure kids into the woods.

In a kid-friendly, safe way, of course.

Rob, the forest ranger (left) and Bas, the writer, on bikes through the forest

We started to explore the city forest on, incidentally, the hottest day of the year. Rob, the forest ranger, showed me and Bas, the writer who works at Toffey, all the sights of the forest. We saw Siberian chipmunks (exotic to the Netherlands) and the tallest insect hotel I've ever seen. We even visited a Celtic tree horoscope (apparently I'm a maple)!

Bas started writing. He came up with the story of Kruin, the city tree who starts looking for 'the forest', even though he has no idea what it is or how it looks like. Along the way he meets a lot of friends with their own idea about the forest.

A peek behind the scenes!

As Toffey is based 117km from Amsterdam, where I lived, we worked in Miro. Miro is a kind of online notice board that we can adjust simultaneously. It worked pretty well, we could add notes in realtime and communicate with each other through the board as if we were sitting next to eachother. I never got feedback this fast, haha.

an early sketch of Kruin we liked

The project took, for me, all summer. It was a huge task that had to share time with another big project I did for Hortus Botanicus. This meant I was working from 10:00 - 18:00 on the children's book project, and 20:00 - 23:00, and some weekends, on the botanical project. To make it easier for myself, and to make sure I absolutely missed every bit of this summer, I also started house hunting. Got any good planning tips? For some reason, everything in my life always seems to happen all at once.

A finished page that also perfectly illustrates my mood mid-summer

In the end, we got there! Together we made the lovely book 'De Boom die het Bos wilde zien' (the Tree who wanted to see the Forest), full of flashy squirrels and stately kingfishers. We had a little launch party on Oct 15 in Tilburg. A big day for me, as I also signed the sale of my new house (see? I told you everything happens together).

The book will be distributed at schools and libraries in Tilburg, and for every book sold, we're giving one away to a child with smaller means. The most important thing this books wants to sell, is love for reading and love for the forest. I hope I contributed to that! Thank you Toffey and Stadsbos013 for this wonderful project!