Vertelsels van de Grove Den

“Vertelsels van de Grove Den” (Tales of the Scots Pine) is a podcast series by Stuifzand (Drift Sand) and Het Geluidshuis (The Sound House).

Brace yourself for tales of a magical elephant, a king who wants to marry his own daughter, a gang of fierce ghost riders, and a baker’s daughter who drives robbers insane with her clever tricks.

If you understand Dutch, you can listen to the series on Spotify.

Every week, I’ll share the cover of the latest episode and some extra’s on this page.

Episode 1

De Wonderen van Odrada van Balen

MAY 2025: The VERY FIRST SKETCHES

I made these first sketches based on the rough drafts for the stories.
Stuifzand knew they wanted drawings of the main characters.
So, In my first proposal in may 2025, I included some rough sketches so we had something to talk about. I kept them fast and rough, so nothing was lost if we decided to go in another direction.

Click the drawings for a better look.

Episode 2

Hansken en Grietje in Mol

This story is based on the visit of the elephant Hansken to the village of Mol in 1648.

Standing on the shoulders of Giants

Because an elephant was such a rarity in 17th century Europe, many artists made sketches of Hansken. The reference drawings for this episode cover were provided by none other than Rembrandt himself! The great Dutch master sketched Hansken around 1637, when she (yes, Hansken was female!) visited Amsterdam

This image is part of a bigger copperplate etching with all tricks Hansken performed was sold a souvenir.

So these are the sketches and finished drawings based on these historical records.

Episode 3

De Klompen van Veerle in Laakdal

June 2025: More Sketches

Based on the feedback from Stuifzand and Het Geluidshuis:

• We agreed that Mast and Muts were real trees and not characters based on the characteristics of these trees, so I made a rough second version for their designs.
• They liked the characters from my first proposal, so I made rough sketches for all characters of the podcast series.

This is what I send them:

Episode 4

“Rien en de Achturenmoeier in Retie“

The textures – Handmade on paper, vectorised for infinte Scaling

Everyone involved loved the dirty and gritty textures from my first proposal.
I learned from experience that hunting for textures online is never really fun and often you settle for “something that works”, but not for what you really had in mind.

So I grabbed my sponges, inks and even a piece of wood and spend the afternoon making dirty textures on paper.

I also painted different parts for the tree shapes in black ink on paper.
This approach gave me the freedom to work messy and combine the textures and shapes digitally in the next step.

I scanned all of them them, and turned them into vector graphics, so Stuifzand could use them for big prints as well.

I make all my work with Affinity.
The new Studio version came out a few months ago and has a build in image trace function. I still had to use Inkscape as a workaround. I’ve been living Adobe free for a few years now and both (free!) programs are great replacements for Illustrator.

Episode 5

Peer Plimp en Katje Slim in Meerhout

Peer Plimp (real name: Petrus Vermeerbergen) was a miller in Meerhout who made electricity with his watermill. As this is one of the more recent legends in the series. Stuifzand is a heritage organisation, so they send me some old pictures of Peer Plimp, his family and the water mill.

And I know Peer Plimp ended up as a tiny character in the background on the episode cover… so this might be a good to show you all extra characters and poses I made. These can be used in broader communication around the podcast series.

Episode 6

Dimpna in Geel

The story of how a young Irish princess tried to escape her father who got mad after the death of his wife and wanted to mary his daughter. She ended up in Geel (Belgium) and tragically became Saint-Dymphna, patroness saint of the mentally ill. Until this day, Geel is known for the de-institutionalized method of care for the mentally ill.

As this is the penultimate episode of the series, it’s time to wrap up my work. So what did Stuifzand, Het Geluidshuis and the seven participating municipalities got from me?

I shared them one dropbox-link where they could find:

• The seven podcast covers in different formats for different platforms.

• A library of all the different parts for web and print, meant for graphic designers at Stuifzand and in the different municipalities.
  I also provided this handy index sheet as a reference:

• A template on Canva, meant for communication people at the seven municipalities involved. With this template they can make their own variations of the podcast-series for social media. It took me some time to figure out a method that worked for everyone. Not every story design was perfect, but it was a lot faster and flexible for them than contacting me every time they wanted to send out a social media post.
• A pdf-manual on how to use all this templates and parts and some extra style guidance guidance. Think of it as a mini brand-book.

Next week: The last episode and some pictures of these illustrations in the wild