Educational illustrations

Here are a couple of my illustrations for a speech therapy company Kipinäkeskus that commissioned me to illustrate new material for their use and for sale. This was a really great project to do, though very demanding too. In educational material the illustrator has to take even the smallest of the client's requests into account and make the picture appealing for children. There is always a lot of detail that has to be accurately presented.
I had an extensive list of words, especially verbs, to illustrate. The two kindergarten images had a total of 70 people! I don't use computer that much, but these illustrations I coloured in PS. It always surprises me, how quick and easy it is compared to actually painting everything as an original artwork. For me, the most demanding task was to follow the perspective...

Friendship Day stamp design competition

I thought I share my process of creating my postage stamp designs for a competition organized by Posti Group together with Kuvittajat, Association of Finnish Illustrators and Grafia, Association of Finnish Communication Designers. The theme was Finnish version of Valentine's Day, the Friendship Day. The job was to design five stamps around this theme. I came third in the competition, which I was so happy about as these illustrations were made with a lot of thought and love!
My idea was to illustrate animals and children posing in a school photo shoot in a "BFF" kind of a way. I chose animals that are related to each other even when they are different species, whether they are domestic or wild animals. I wanted to make a point that despite the cultural differences, you can be friends with each other. But I also wanted to illustrate happy, joyful friends, sweet characters with a bit of humour too. I chose to go for a retro colour palette and simple, graphic shapes for the characters.

I started with some small thumbnails in a sketchbook, simplified my characters, just played around. Then I did the actual illustrations with black ink on A3 paper, one for each (really big!). Like these here below:

Then I scanned the illustrations and played with the colour palette on my computer. I had some very strange colour versions, some were ok...

And when I had decided the colours, the final designs were fine-tuned and turned into vector illustrations. So this is how they looked like in the end!