The Influence of Old Book Illustrations on My Work

I never consciously developed an illustration style. It’s something that has always been there.

As a teenager, I drew constantly in notebooks during school breaks — small scenes, people sitting by windows, trees after rain, the corner of a room. At the time I didn’t think of it as vintage or nostalgic. I was simply drawing what felt familiar.

Looking back, I can see how much of that instinct came from the things around me. Old Danish books on our shelves. The restrained line work in European storybooks from the 1940s through the 1970s. The slightly softened edges of printed illustrations from a time when images were reproduced from physical plates.

I never studied those illustrations formally, but I absorbed them — the way you absorb the atmosphere of a place without trying to analyse it.

There’s a certain quiet language in antique book illustration. It doesn’t explain itself. It leaves space for the viewer to notice small things: a line suggesting a shadow, a figure turned slightly away, a room that feels lived in even when only a few details are drawn.

That quality has stayed with me when I draw.

I’m not trying to recreate the past. But I am interested in that tone — the looseness of line, the slightly muted palette, the sense that the scene belongs somewhere just outside the present moment.

Sometimes the references come from Danish visual culture — early graphic design, field guides, or the illustrations in books we carried on childhood walks through forests and fields.

Other times the influence is more tactile: the texture of paper, the way winter light falls across a wooden floor, or the quiet atmosphere of a farmhouse kitchen.

Most drawings begin with something simple — a place, a posture, a small moment. A person pausing by a window. A corner of a table. A path between trees.

I rarely plan the image in detail. I start drawing and let the scene gradually appear.

It’s never about making something perfect. It’s about making something that feels as though it already existed — somewhere between memory and observation.

That’s the kind of illustration I’m drawn to.

The kind that knows when to stop. The kind that leaves a little space around the edges.

Related: See more illustrations in my art portfolio or read about how I build atmosphere through small details in 4 Vintage-Inspired Scenes from Denmark.