Plums, chums! – Get them down from the crown!

Illustration: Ann Cathrin Raab
Text: Mareike Postel

Plums, chums! – Get them down from the crown!

Look, up there! The plums on that tree look so tasty!
Come on, it’s on! Oh tree, let me take you and jostle and shake you! Come on!

Every page shows a new vain and ludicrous attempt by the ambitious little picker to get to the purple plums he craves. In the fight for sweet joy anything goes.

Ann Cathrin Raab’s minimalist style of illustration captures the hilarious interactions between the little sweet tooth and the plum tree so expertly, they almost appear animated. Flipping through quickly, a flipbook-like illusion of movement ensues, and whizzing through Mareike Postel’s rhymes, eventually, chums, we’ll get to the plums!

Ann Cathrin and Mareike love colorful ideas, quirky tales, and creative crosspollination – they have been creating picture books together since 2020, as Ann Cathrin’s funny pictures keep finding their match in Mareike’s fantastic rhymes.

Ann Cathrin Raab: »After making rough drafts of several scenes, I develop individual characters with pencil on paper until lots of different versions crowd the page. Then I look ath them and pick the best one. The same goes for trees – featuring branches, larger or smaller leaves – a tree is just another »character«.
The results are the starting point for my digital drawings. At the drawing board, I finalize the scenes based on my sketches, choosing brush sizes and colors imitating »real« drawings.«

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