We are delighted to welcome illustrator Britta Teckentrup to Story Snug as part of her Bee blog tour. Britta’s beautiful illustrations accompany Patricia Hegarty’s rhyming text about the important work that a bee does. The lyrical text awakens every sense, we listen to gentle humming, we smell sweet perfume and we watch the bee as she travels through the orchard, over a stream and back to the hive where she enlists the help of other bees. Bees buzz through pages which are a riot of rainbow colours and include every kind of flower you can imagine. In this blogpost Britta explains where she got her inspiration for the illustrations in Bee.
5 Natural Inspirations
I don’t really know where to start…
There were so many inspirations coming from so many different sources.
Who doesn’t love flowers, summer and bees!
Memories of childhood came flooding back like:
Running through fields and meadows…
My holidays in the Austrian mountains…
Picking wildflowers with my grandmother…
Making daisy chains…
And lying in the grass…
Seeing the sunflower fields in Italy for the first time…
And the endless rows of tulips in the Netherlands…
And a lot later when I moved to England I was impressed by all the beautiful gardens, poppy fields, bluebells, magnolia and cherry blossoms…
All these images came into my mind when I first received the beautiful text by Pat Hegarty from Little Tiger Books.
I was inspired straight away – the perfect follow up to ‘Tree’.
In art I always admired Monet’s water lilies and the work of Georgia O’Keeffe.
I am in love with Dutch tulip paintings and am absolutely fascinated by old botanical book illustrations of flowers.
Four Tulips ca. 1635 by Jakob Marrel (Dutch)
Tulip 17th Century by Semper Augustus
Old botanical flower illustrations
It was almost a case of having too much inspiration!
Thank you so much for visiting Story Snug Britta. It’s really interesting to get an insight into the inspirations behind your work, we’ve been looking for the tulips in Bee that were inspired by the Dutch tulip paintings!
About Britta Teckentrup
Britta Teckentrup was born in Hamburg, Germany and moved to the UK in 1988 to study illustration and fine art at St Martin’s College and the Royal College of Art. Britta has written and illustrated over 80 picture books, which have been published in over 20 different countries. As well as producing many best-sellers, Britta has won numerous awards including a Special Mention at the Bologna Ragazzi, Most Innovative Picture Book at the Junior Design Awards for Tree as well as recently being shortlisted for the 2016 Independent Booksellers Week Awards. Tree has sold over 30,000 copies worldwide and rights have been sold in 11 territories. After 17 years in the UK, Britta now lives and works in Berlin with her Scottish husband, son Vincent and their old cat Oskar.
Visit the other stops on the ‘Bee Nature’s Miracle Blog Tour’ to hear Britta talking more about her work and her illustrations. Tomorrow you can find her on Little Tiger’s blog.
Thank you to Little Tiger Press for inviting us to join Britta’s blog tour and for sending us a copy of this stunning picture book.
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