An interview with the colorist behind The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter

The most arresting visual feature of The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter (Vlieger, 2024) — the picture book that won the Vlaamse Cultuurprijs that year and which we believe will be looked back on as one of the important picture books of the decade — is its color separation. The book uses three inks: a fluorescent orange (Pantone 805 C), a cool cyan-leaning gray (a custom mix), and warm black. The covers and end papers add a fourth: a soft buttery cream.

What makes the book technically extraordinary is that the three interior colors are printed on two different presses, on the same day, in two passes through the binding. The fluorescent orange runs on one press; the cyan-gray and warm black run on another. The plates are then collated and bound. The result is a depth of color saturation that single-press printing cannot achieve.

The illustrator is Lien Geeroms. The colorist — and, by all accounts, the technical engine of the project — is Maja Tielemans, who has worked on Belgian print production for twenty-two years. She agreed to meet us in her studio in Ghent in mid-March.

Nightnight.art: Walk me through the decision to separate the inks the way you did.

Tielemans: Lien came to me with the rough plates in January 2023. She had drawn everything in pencil — light and dark grayscale. She had a vision for the color: a fluorescent orange for the lighthouse beam, the dawn, the cheeks of the keeper’s daughter. And a cool gray for everything else — the sea, the sky, the rocks. The black would be the line work.

The cheap version of this is to print four-color CMYK and approximate the orange with magenta plus yellow. That gives you a kind of orange — a printable orange — but it is not the orange Lien wanted. Lien wanted a glowing orange. The kind of orange that, when you see it on the page in a quiet room, you feel slightly warmer.

That orange does not exist in standard four-color process. It only exists as a spot color — and even then, only as fluorescent pigment.

NN: How does fluorescent ink behave differently?

Tielemans: Fluorescent pigments absorb UV light and re-emit it as visible light. This means a fluorescent orange is brighter than the paper it’s printed on. It does not simply reflect — it adds light to the page. The visual effect, especially in low-light conditions like a bedside lamp, is that the orange seems lit from within.

The cost is that fluorescent pigments are unstable. They fade. They cannot be photographed accurately. They will not survive the same plates as conventional inks because they require specific drying conditions. This is why we had to use two presses.

NN: Two presses on the same day. That sounds operationally insane.

Tielemans: It was. The first press was a small Heidelberg in our studio in Ghent, set up for the fluorescent. We printed three thousand sheets of orange-only impressions on uncoated paper. The sheets had to dry for exactly fourteen hours under specific humidity conditions. The next morning, the sheets went to a different press — a Komori, in a print shop fifteen minutes away — where the cyan-gray and warm black were printed in a single pass.

NN: Why fourteen hours?

Tielemans: Because if the fluorescent isn’t fully dry, the second-press inks pick up the fluorescent particles and the whole color is contaminated. If it’s too dry, the surface becomes too matte and the cyan doesn’t bond. Fourteen hours, at 18 degrees Celsius, at 50% humidity. We had to control the studio environment.

NN: What happens if any of those variables drift?

Tielemans: Then you have a thousand bad sheets, and you start over. The first attempt — in December 2023 — produced six hundred unusable sheets because the humidity was too high. We lost three weeks. I cried a little. Lien did not cry but she went very quiet, which from Lien is worse.

NN: How did you handle the registration?

Tielemans: This was the hardest part. When you print on two different presses, the sheets shift very slightly between runs. The orange could be one millimeter off the cyan-gray. For most uses, one millimeter does not matter. For this book, where the orange and the cyan-gray are deliberately adjacent — where the lighthouse beam meets the gray sky, where the dawn meets the cool water — one millimeter would have been visible.

We made registration marks in the gutter of every spread, invisible after binding. The Komori press operator and I checked them on every fiftieth sheet. We discarded about 8% of total sheets for misregistration. The publisher absorbed this cost. They understood.

NN: Worth it?

Tielemans: (long pause) When you open the book in a quiet room with a bedside lamp on, the lighthouse beam glows. The first time I saw a bound copy I sat in my kitchen and just looked at the page for a long time. So yes. It was worth it.

NN: Could this kind of work be done digitally?

Tielemans: No. There is no digital surface that does what fluorescent ink on uncoated paper does. The page reflects light differently than a screen. The fluorescent re-emits ambient UV. The paper texture catches reading-lamp light. There is a physical interaction between the page and the room that a screen cannot reproduce.

This is, I think, an underrated argument for printed picture books in 2026. The book is doing something the tablet cannot, materially, do. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not held this particular book in dim light.

NN: Will more publishers do this kind of work?

Tielemans: No. It is too expensive. The retail price of The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter in Belgium is €28, which is high for a picture book. The print run is small. The publisher will not make money on it. They made the book because they wanted to make this book. There are not many publishers left who will do that.

Tielemans walked us through her studio after the formal interview ended. Two letterpress machines from the 1960s, in working condition. A small bookbinding bench. Three pots of currently-mixing custom inks. A small fluorescent orange test sheet pinned to the wall — the result of one of the failed runs from December 2023, kept for reference.

The book itself sat open on her workbench, on a spread depicting the keeper’s daughter watching the dawn from a cliff. The orange did, in fact, glow.

— Theo Klein. The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter (Lien Geeroms, illus.; Vlieger, 2024) is available through Belgian booksellers and a few specialty shops internationally. The English edition is in negotiation as of mid-2026.