Gertie Jaquet

Gertie was born in Egmond aan Zee (1958). As a child she was always drawing, playing with her doll house or pretending to play ‘post office’ (which is where her love for stamps started!).  Gertie lives and works in the centre of Amsterdam and shares a studio space underneath a railway viaduct with illustrator colleagues.

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She went to a high school where you could choose Arts as a final exam subject, something that at the time (in the seventies) was still rare. After that, she went to the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam to study Illustration.

 

Gertie illustrates children’s books and picture books, some of which she has written herself. The books about Haas (‘Hare’), written by Annemarie Bon, are the best known. 17 different volumes have already appeared. Together they made the musical puppet show Worteltjestaart (‘Carrot cake’) about the characters from Haas.

 

Gertie has also made illustrations and animations for Sesamstraat (‘Sesame Street’) and has illustrated for magazines such as Pipapanda, Flow and the French Les Belles Histoires.

 

Usually she uses brush pens, pastels and colored pencils, but she also increasingly uses self-cut stamps in her illustrations. The Gouden Boekje (‘Golden Book’) Gompelemikkie! was fully illustrated with stamps.

 

For the store Hema she created a series of cardboard books illustrated with stamps, on which Hema based a collection of toys. She has made thousands of stamps and wrote the book Stempelen! (‘Stamp!’) about making stamps.