Miffy has changed quite a lot since the early books, although I never realised it at the time.

I have been drawing all my life.

I come from a family of business people, but I had the idea I wanted to become an artist.

I thought it would be very nice to become Picasso or Rembrandt, or a van Gogh.

But we discovered that, although I liked publishing, the commercial side meant nothing at all to me.

My father realised that for me to become a publisher in his firm would have been the end of the firm!