Bob Staake

I first came across Bob's work in a weird and wonderful book called Struwwelpeter: And Other Disturbing Tales for Human Beings.

In the words of the Amazon synopsis, it is,

'A 21st century spin on "Der Struwwelpeter", 14 stories originally written in 1845 by German physician Heinrich Hoffmann, which read like a fairy tale breaking loose from a doomed roller-coaster, crashing through a rusty calliope and finally splashing into the miasmic ooze of Hell - but somehow still managing to float...

'Staake renders the nastiest things that happen to children who disobey their parents: thumb-suckers have their digits cut off, pint-sized pyromaniacs are set ablaze and picky eaters rot away and die prematurely.'

His illustrations are superb, quirky and instantly recognisable. And yet he creates them all using a 1994 version of Photoshop (version 3) running in Classic mode on an Apple Macintosh G5.

Visit his excellent website to see more of his pictures. Or spend a couple of minutes on YouTube watching how he creates his characters.
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