Vintage-Illustrations: Scenes from Denmark

Old photographs, films, and illustrated books are among the things I return to most often when looking for material to draw. I'm particularly interested in Denmark in the early and mid-20th century—not only how places looked, but the details that locate a scene in a particular time: clothing, architecture, railway stations, gardens, furniture, and the landscape itself. Those details often find their way into my own illustrations.

Vintage-inspired Danish garden illustration by Liv Hansen.

The drawing here began with an everyday garden scene: a woman carrying a basket of vegetables, a watering can left beside the path, cabbages growing in rows, and a bird perched on the fence. There isn't an event to explain or a story with a fixed beginning and end. I like leaving some of that unresolved. The details suggest a life beyond the edges of the drawing and leave enough room for the viewer to imagine the rest.

Looking at Earlier Scandinavian Illustration

One of the things I find interesting about Scandinavian book and magazine illustration from the 20th century is how much attention was given to everyday surroundings.

A garden fence, a path through woodland, the edge of a field, or a small railway platform could carry an entire image. The setting wasn't simply background. It told you something about the people who inhabited it and the world they belonged to.

That interests me far more than reproducing a generalized “vintage” appearance.

Historical reference is useful precisely because it is specific. An old photograph can tell you how a coat hung, what was growing beside a country road, how a station sign was lettered, or what somebody kept on their kitchen table. Films can be equally revealing—not only through costume and production design, but through gesture, movement, and the way people occupy a room.

Drawing Denmark

Many of my illustrations begin with Danish landscapes and places I know: woodland, gardens, fields, coastlines, older streets and railway architecture.

I work primarily in coloured pencil, sometimes combined with gouache. It's a slow medium, which suits the way I draw. An image develops through layers rather than arriving fully formed, and details can be added, removed or altered as the composition takes shape.

Vintage-inspired Danish countryside illustration by Liv Hansen.

I'm not particularly interested in recreating the past exactly as it was. The drawings aren't historical documents. A landscape may come from one place, a figure from another source, and an architectural detail from somewhere else entirely.

What matters is that, together, they make a convincing world.

That is probably what keeps bringing me back to older Danish and Scandinavian imagery. The period details are part of it, but so is recognizing something familiar: places shaped by weather and use, ordinary objects, and people caught in the middle of whatever they happened to be doing.

Those are often the beginnings of a drawing.

Further Reading

Danish Illustrator: Vintage Storytelling and Everyday Scenes

Vintage Design in Copenhagen

Danish Landscapes in Illustration

Scandinavian Illustration Portfolio