Back in 2009 I wrote and illustrated a children's book on sustainability.

My main character, Mara and her little brother Billy find a hedgehog, Marty, awake in the middle of winter. The reader follows the siblings throughout the whole story where they try to find out what to do, to get the hedgehog to go to sleep again.

A little girl like Mara can't know much about sustainability, but she learns about it, by encountering a quirky Professor. Professor Quirk is also an inventor and knows a lot about animals, environmental problems and how to reduce them. In my story he is a rather strange but intelligent man who lives in a futuristic house, with solar panels on the roof and windmills in the garden. He is a guide for the children in the book and for the readers. The book is interactive with fun experiments, easy recipes and simple tips for everyday life, to help the environment.

Since I also wanted to touch the subject of illegal deforestation, I decided to create a character from the rainforest area, a moonrat called Corazon, a distant cousin of Marty the hedgehog.

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Creating collages as the illustration for the book was yet an other fun and creative way to emphasise sustainability by incorporating recycling.