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Berlin illustrator Jill Senft's 'Treemendous' zine about trees and puns

We've recently discovered the work of Berlin-based illustrator Jill Senft. A graduate of Visual Communication from Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee last summer, she is now working freelance, primarily on printed media but she also loves to paint on large canvas for fun and focus on little side projects, such as one recent example – "Treemendous", an illustrated zine about trees and puns.

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Spread from Jill Senft's Treemendous zine showing colourful illustrations of Treetment and Dioptree with stylised characters and geometric shapes

Full of her plumped-up characters and delightfully bright colour palette, the printed book highlights "Bigotree" and "Treeathlon" amongst its many plays on words, with Jill making up new names for her favourite types of trees.

"There was just this idea about an arboretum, to collect trees and name them in a book or kind of zine," explains Jill, "which I quickly found boring as it already exists. But that didn't detract my fascination about trees in general.

"Apart from externals and the obvious things, I was wondering what else they do for us or we do with them. During my research, I stumbled over all these English words that sounded like 'tree' to me. So I made kind of a joke with the puns in the beginning. That’s how the fun part came to life, I got motivated about the topic again and I started painting all these trees I find really fascinating and named them differently. I invented somehow new tree species like Dioptree, Treeathlon and Treeceps."

The cover of Jill Senft's zine Treemendous featuring a stylised dark green tree against a light blue background with pink and blue text at the top
Spread from Jill Senft's Treemendous zine showing orange concentric circles on the left and a green tree-shaped figure holding pink flowers labelled Bigotree on a blue background on the right
Two pages from Jill Senft's illustrated zine "Treemendous" featuring colourful cartoon characters and playful tree puns with bold typography on vibrant backgrounds
Two pages from Jill Senft's Treemendous zine: left page shows a colourful figure holding a branch against brown background labelled Treeathlon; right page displays a storefront with sign reading The Bird against purple background labelled Pantree
Pages from Jill Senft's Treemendous zine featuring colourful illustrations of trees and puns, with a purple tree on a pink background and a playful figure juggling on a dark green background
Two pages from Jill Senft's zine showing illustrated trees with pun names: Treenidad Tobago and Countree, featuring colourful characters and whimsical designs
Jill Senft's Treemendous zine cover showing a pink character juggling among colourful flowers on the left, and concentric orange and black rings on the right
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