Ontwerp voor een boekband voor: Aart van der Leeuw, De kleine Rudolf, 1930 1928 - 1930

This book cover design for Aart van der Leeuw’s, "De kleine Rudolf", was made around 1930 by Leo Gestel. I love how it looks like it was made spontaneously. There's this figure in a hat – Little Rudolf, I guess – standing there, and then there are these squiggly lines and the title lettering hovering above. It's all so playfully put together. I wonder if Gestel was thinking about the simple, bold designs of folk art when he made this. There’s something very direct about the way the forms are rendered and how the paint—or maybe it’s ink—is applied so thinly. I imagine Gestel sketching this out quickly, trying to capture the essence of the story with just a few strokes of the brush. It feels like a conversation, a dialogue between the artist and the story he's illustrating, and it makes you think about how much can be communicated with just a little bit of paint and a lot of imagination. It reminds me of other artists who were pushing boundaries with simple forms, creating a whole world with just a few shapes and lines.