Hansje Pansje – a musical adventure for little ones!
2025-11-13
Together with my daughters Caroline and Saskia, I created something special: a push‑button book full of Dutch children's songs, especially for toddlers and preschoolers. It was truly a family project:
- I made the illustrations — colourful and playful, perfectly suited to the world of young children.
- Saskia recorded the songs with her clear voice, turning every button into a musical moment.
- Caroline brought everything together: selecting the songs, arranging the printing, and sorting out subsidies.
We are incredibly proud of the result! And now we want to publish this book so other children can enjoy it too.
Through Voordekunst we receive help to raise the required amount via match‑funding. That means we are partly dependent on crowdfunding.
View our project through this link:
Would you like to help us make this project a reality? Share our campaign with others who love music and children!
Domains and Kingdoms
2019-05-15
In the last century, the living world was divided into three domains: the bacteria, the archaea, and the eukaryotes. Eukaryotes have a nucleus, mitochondria, and can be multicellular.
Eukaryotes were divided into four kingdoms: animals, plants, fungi, and protists. Now that we can trace evolutionary history through DNA, the tree of life turns out to be far more complex.
Protists do not form a single group and appear in many different places in the evolutionary tree. Animals are more closely related to fungi and amoebas than to plants.
The evolutionary trees of Archaea and Bacteria are difficult to reconstruct because pieces of DNA can jump randomly between cells.
Eukaryotes originated from a symbiosis between an archaeal cell and a bacterium, with the mitochondrion formed from the bacterium.
The genetic material in all cells seems to have a common origin, but the cell membranes do not. Archaea have a different type of membrane.
Scientists now think the first cells arose in the pores of volcanic rock on the ocean floor, initially without membranes. LUCA — the last universal common ancestor — had no membrane.
Nick Lane describes this in his book The Vital Question.
Colouring
2018-10-09
“Gemma can draw well, but she will never become a famous artist, because she cannot colour nicely,” said Sister Redempta in the 5th grade. And she was right.
I didn’t enjoy filling areas with coloured pencils. Sometimes I received a colouring book with examples that were beautifully even — something impossible to achieve with pencils.
We weren’t allowed to use felt‑tip pens in primary school. In secondary school we were. In art class we filled the sides of a cube with felt‑tip pens and drew patterns, because even colouring was still impossible — the strokes always showed.
In secondary school I learned that you can do more with coloured pencils than just fill areas. My classmate Terry made gradients, from dark to white or from one colour to another. That looked much better.
But those perfectly even areas from colouring books — I could never make them. Not even later, with paint. I thought printers had a simple method for it.
Later I read that Dick Bruna made his illustrations with coloured paper. That gives perfectly even areas, but it is a lot of work.
Now there are digital drawing programs that let you fill areas beautifully and evenly.
Someone Rings the Doorbell
2018-04-19
My daughters Caroline and Saskia made a song about my dogs Masja and Mickey, using the music of The Show Must Go On by Queen. I created an animation to go with it. Queen owns the copyright to the music.
I tried to obtain permission through Buma‑Stemra to publish the animation online. I was referred to Sony ATV and Umusic.
I had to translate everything into English and fill out a form. I wrote eight emails. I was told I probably wouldn’t get permission, and if I did, it would cost thousands of euros.
It was made for fun, so I gave up — but my daughters didn’t.
They emailed the animation to Brian May, added English subtitles, and received permission to publish it on YouTube. Simple.
BNO
2018-03-06
When I started illustrating, I made everything on paper, often without a contract. I sent illustrations by post. Sometimes they were returned, sometimes not.
Through the Dutch Illustrators Association I ended up at BNO in 1998. They taught me about my rights and kept illustrators informed.
Publishers began offering contracts stating that illustrators had to give up their copyright. BNO advised against signing such contracts and created a legally valid alternative.
For clients without their own contract, I used the BNO contract.
Later I received contracts from publishers. I sent them to BNO for review. Something was always wrong. BNO advised me to request changes. I tried, but contracts were rarely adjusted for me.
At a BNO meeting, many illustrators who refused to sign such contracts struggled to find work. One cheerful illustrator said she always signed everything and therefore had plenty of work.
Comic Strip
2018-02-14
I never became a comic artist. It wasn’t my path, and it’s difficult to come up with something funny regularly. Still, I once made a comic — about Sanoma’s restrictive contracts.
Sanoma had taken over VNU in 2001 and offered illustrators a contract allowing them to reuse all illustrations for five years for free.
If you didn’t sign, you received no more assignments. Many illustrators signed — lacking better options.
Henk Stolkers encouraged illustrators to make comics protesting the contract. I joined in.
Did it help? BNO started negotiating with Sanoma and other publishers. They still do.
Portrait of Beatrix
2017-11-21
I enjoyed drawing portraits. To get assignments, I needed examples. I had drawn portraits during my studies at the Rietveld Academy, but that was more than ten years earlier.
I thought it would be useful to have a new example of someone everyone knew. So I made a portrait of Beatrix, who was queen at the time.
There was no internet then. I only had photos from newspapers and magazines. I used a good photo from the cover of Elsevier.
Later someone told me you may not paint from someone else’s photo without the photographer’s permission. I didn’t know that at the time.
Years later, this painting hung in an exhibition of sixty portraits of Beatrix for her 60th birthday.
The Night Watch and the Style of Bruna
2017-10-18
Long ago I sometimes promised to draw in someone else’s style. I always regretted it. To show how difficult it is, I tried to recreate Rembrandt’s Night Watch in the style of Dick Bruna.
I posted the result on my website. Thanks to the internet I came into contact with other illustrators and discovered that Bruna’s style was protected.
I asked Mercis for permission — and received it.
The picture was too busy, with too many details and different colours. So this Night Watch is not truly in Bruna’s style.
Normally, artistic styles are not protected by copyright. But for Bruna, an exception was made under tort law.
His thick black lines were built up millimetre by millimetre, giving them a personal vibration. His way of creating space without perspective is hard to imitate.
My version is a vector illustration with smooth lines. The colours are mine; the composition is Rembrandt’s.
Mistake
2017-10-10
The books The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins and Sociobiology by E.O. Wilson appeared when I studied biology. I summarised their theories like this: the genes that survived evolution are those that produce as many fertile offspring as possible.
Genes guide feelings. If you do something good for their survival, you feel good. If you do something harmful, you feel bad.
After each birth I was happy, but the feeling didn’t last. Why?
Dawkins explained it in The Blind Watchmaker: genes are never satisfied. Once they get what they want, they ask for more — until you’re about fifty.
After that, you have twenty years to raise the youngest children. This seems unfavourable, but most of human evolution took place during times of high child mortality. Genes adapted to that world, not ours.
Desire for Children
2017-10-05
Predicting what humans will be like in the distant future is difficult. But for the near future, something can be said.
As long as children inherit traits from their parents, they will resemble them.
In the past, parents were people who enjoyed sex. Now they are people with a desire for children.
If that desire is hereditary, it increases. People with a strong desire for children have more children, so each generation contains more people who also want children. This leads to overpopulation.
Perhaps in the future we can remove the “child‑desire genes” from our descendants’ DNA.
But people with a “grandchild‑desire” will not cooperate.
Consciousness
2017-10-04
Psychologist Gordon Gallup developed the mirror test to determine whether an animal — or a child — recognises itself in a mirror.
First you give the animal a mirror to explore. When it sleeps, you place a mark on a spot it can only see in the mirror. If it tries to remove the mark, it understands the reflection is itself.
Some Japanese researchers believe they can eventually create a robot with consciousness. But how do you test that?
You can program a robot to pass the mirror test, but that does not prove it has anything resembling human consciousness.
Do they mean something measurable? Or simply a robot that reacts like we do?
Big but Short, Small but Long
2017-09-26
I have made many illustrations for biology books, including drawings of reproductive organs.
Just before I made my first drawing of female genitalia, I heard on the radio that many girls thought their inner labia were too long. They didn’t know it is normal for the inner labia to be longer than the outer ones.
In schoolbooks they were always drawn shorter. That was unfortunate for those girls. So I drew long inner labia. The clients didn’t like it, so I changed the illustration.
Later it seemed they were right: media reported that many girls had their long inner labia shortened. Plastic surgeons were pleased.
But that turned out not to be true. Wikipedia says 60% of women have long inner labia. So schoolbooks often show the uncommon form.
Fortunately, digital biology methods can now easily adjust the illustration.
Crocodiles
2017-09-21
Sometimes a company commissions illustrations but never intends to use them — usually because they want to keep future plans secret.
I was asked to draw crocodiles for an energy company. They were meant for a children’s booklet about energy. I made twelve crocodiles.
Then the company merged. The new company wanted penguins instead. The crocodiles were paid for but never used.
I thought for a long time about a story in which I could use them. My daughter said I could put two crocodiles in one picture — and suddenly it became much easier.
That’s how the animation of Joep and Rogier came to be.
My Father
2014-06-27
At the end of first grade, my father could read and do arithmetic so well that he was allowed to skip a grade. He ended up in the same class as his oldest brother.
He deliberately made mistakes in his tests, perhaps to stay on good terms with his brother.
When he was in fifth grade, the teacher brought a book to school. It would be given to the pupil who made no mistakes for a whole week. My father wanted it very much — and made no mistakes.
But the teacher changed the rules. Four pupils were allowed to throw chalk at a circle on the board. His brother won. Then there was a second round, and another boy won the book.
My grandparents had nine children and little time for problems. In 1928 it was not customary to ask a teacher for an explanation.
My father learned from it: skipping grades is not good, and teachers were unreliable. When my mother said she would have liked to become a teacher, my father said he would never have married her if she had.