How and why did you decide to pursue illustration as your career?

I must've been 9 or 10 years old when I talked with my parents about some art I liked from one of my picture books. I told them that I really wanted to make drawings for a book too, and then my parents explained to me that it was an actual profession, and people who drew them were called "illustrators." 

From that moment, I knew I wanted to become an illustrator too, which has been my goal ever since.

What is your favourite medium to work with and why?

I own a lot of different art materials, but right now, gouache is my go-to medium when I start a new illustration. I guess it's the versatility that the medium offers that I'm so drawn to. The colors can be very rich and opaque. Yet, if I dilute the paint with a bit of water, I can work in transparent layers too like with aquarelle paints. 

How many times do you tend to draw a character until you are happy with it?

For my first self-written and illustrated children's book, I was very picky. There are some scenes in which the sketches and paintings were okay in one go, while there are a couple of them that I re-painted over and over again until it felt that they carried the right emotion.

One of them is the scene in which you see the main characters, a squirrel and a fox, propelling themselves from a hill on a vehicle that's lightly based on a soapbox car. It was important that the fox looked very scared while the squirrel is enjoying herself immensely. I sometimes still want to fidget with that illustration, but the book has been published now, so I won't. Haha. Sometimes you just need to stop and accept that it's good enough.