Amsterdammertjes

The municipality held a few experiments recently. They want to push cars out of the city, so they sprinkled the canals with many poles to block the roads. One consequence was that emergency services like ambulances and police could not easily reach certain areas anymore.

The poles could theoretically be removed, but I replaced them with unmovable “Amsterdammertjes.”

I’m not entirely against removing traffic from the center of Amsterdam. There’s much less noise and air pollution now, which is great if you live there. But it’s also much more complicated for delivery vans and taxis and such to get there. It’s complicated.

Also, I am experimenting and seeing how far I can go with just a line. I had to erase a part of this drawing to make it read again. Adding too much detail can clutter it and make it unreadable. You can solve that with tone and color, but I want to see how far I can take this approach to only use lines.

I am going to submit this drawing to a local newspaper to see if they’d be interested in publishing my illustrations.

Here’s another one, more an illustration of the theme of the previous edition, which was city dwellers:

The article mentioned Amsterdam wasn’t just a municipality but had gotten city rights not too long ago. It was hard to joke about that, so it was an illustration.

Also, I used their house color for this one. It would again have been too cluttered otherwise.

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