Category: Blog

Welcome to Simcha, a Jewish boy from the early 20th century Lower East Side. When wooden houses were common, the Forverts building was the highest in the area, horses, pushcart sellers filled certain streets.
A rhymed story by Michael Fox ז”ל, translated into Yiddish by Elye Palevski, tells about being true to one’s traditions in a playful picture book way. Thanks to Kinder-Loshn Publications it should become a book! For me it’s always a magic, how we people get together and make a book from the scratch. It wasn’t there a while ago, but is getting more and more a reality.

The best work for me is to combine Yiddish and illustration. Here is another experience designing a series of postcards and a logo for the club dedicated to the Yiddish culture in Hamburg. I used the first letter of Salomon Birnbaum’s name, shin, as a base for a logo, formed it as a peacock, a pave, with a crown, used on the letter shin in manuscripts. The peacocks on the postcards represent the activities organized by the club: lectures, concerts, postcard circles and trips.

Another book about adventures of Max the dog is out!

This time, Max learns how to be a poodle wizard…

…and does awkward things using the magic powder.

The book “The Old Toy Chest” / “דאָס אַלטע שפּיל-קעסטעלע” will be available for preorder soon. I am looking forward to hold it in my hands too!

Here is a scene from the book with children and their favorite stuffed animals watching TV. I neither have a TV set nor a sofa at home, so I even needed to make a small research to figure out how to make the scene look naturally.

A sneak peek into the book “The old toy chest” (“דאָס אַלטע שפּיל-קעסטעלע”) by Esther Himelstein to be published this year. A bilingual edition by Kinde-Loshn Publications with a sweet story of stuffed animals left alone for decades in the attic. They plan to reunite with their owners and make a surprising discovery that will forever change their destiny.

This small vignette I illustrated while my daughter was a baby, so the timing worked perfectly for such job. Here is also a page from the dummy book, with the text attached on paper over the sketch. I like it playing with the composition using small pieces of paper.

A sneak peek into a book with that many dogs I have never illustrated before.

This is an advent calendar project I started in the summer, but I did not make it before the end of November to be able to print. Behind each of the little doors there are the name of the bird and the sounds they make. As a resource I used a dictionary of bird sounds “Singt der Vogel, ruft er oder schlägt er?” by Peter Krauss. It’s a wonderful reading anyhow, so I enjoyed working on this calendar.

Not sure if I will ever print more then one copy of it.

Digging through not fully used sketchbooks (I normally have about five active and sketch in random ones, that I find the first) I found these friends. I could not remember how I draw them and why. Then I saw the date 23.02.22 and no wonder I completely forgot I ever draw it.

The picture hooks competition has always been my favorite and inspired me to have great time illustrating one single phrase. It is not a marathon, just one or two picture. What a joy.
This time the theme is “What’s inside?”, and here is my entry. One should show a character before and after opening a parcel.

Here are some linocut snowmen. When printing the words, I either missed one or another letter or printed it upside down. I would never be able to be a typesetter a hundred years ago!