Illustrating Children's Books e-course

I had a very busy October as I took a wonderful e-course "Illustrating Children's Books" with Make Art That Sells with top art agent Lilla Rogers and children's book art director Zoë Tucker. This 5-week intensive class covered different areas of illustrating picture books from facial expressions and poses all the way to cover design. After five weeks of working with the course assignments and other commissions I was exhausted, but very happy.

Before the course started we had to choose one of three texts to work with. I chose a text written by Zoë Tucker. It was a story about the life of Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician who is often regarded as the first computer programmer. "Ada Lovelace and the Number Crunching Machine" was my choice over a traditional folk tale and Edward Lear, as I love a bit of research!

The course was packed with information about pretty much everything. I was familiar with illustrating children's books, but now all that knowledge was presented in a fresh, inspiring way. The teachers Lilla and Zoe were fantastic and encouraging.

My main character Ada evolved quite a bit over the five weeks. I enjoyed the "Expressions" week the most, maybe because it was a good reminder of how many other facial expressions there are than just smiling, happy ones! Also "Poses" week was a very useful one to remind me of the power of exaggeration.

Since the course finished I've felt a lot more confident about my work. It was an intense five week period. It's taken a while to catch up with the rest of my life! We even got our first snow during the course, really early this year (now it's gone...).

Ada's friend, fellow inventor Mr Babbage in my neighbourhood forest!

Week 4: "Environments"

Over the five weeks I had a chance to properly experiment with new techniques, mixing traditional media with Photoshop. Now I just worry that I forget all the things I learned. The cover did require some serious help from my studio partner, PS wiz spouse. All those masks can get a bit confusing at the best of times! With my patience, well...

Week 5: "Cover"

Anyone interested on the course, I give it five golden stars!

Exhibition opening action!

Yesterday evening was great fun with my exhibition opening at Annantalo Arts Centre. This exhibition includes gouache illustrations from all four "Elsa ja Lauri" picture books I've made with the author Kerttu Ruuska.

It was the Night of the Arts in Helsinki, so the whole city was packed with happenings, performances, exhibitions, events and late night shopping. I was lucky to have the opening event that same night at Children's Café situated inside Annantalo Arts Centre in the middle of the city centre.
We had prepared a "detective" assignment for the children. They had to find the missing items for Elsa's and Lauri's suitcase before they were due to leave for the airport (as they do in one of the books). The items were all in my paintings, and the search was intense! We gave away small prizes too. And of course, there was a possibility of making paper airplanes, my son's favourite hobby!

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!

Fresh from the press

Our latest book with Kerttu Ruuska was delivered last week. Yay! This week I will put up an exhibition with some of the original artwork at Toukka, a tiny children's book shop in Helsinki. Here is a peak inside the book.

King Gustav III in Suomenlinna

This is the third time that I illustrated the poster and leaflet for Suomenlinna Children's Adventure Tour. Here is the main illustration with handwritten typography. This time the King Gustav III of Sweden has lost his crown and children help him to solve the mystery. After all, the crown is a very important part of being a king! The tour takes the audience to the dark corridors and pathways of the Suomenlinna fortress. Torches are a must! 

Picture books and portraits

I had a wonderful opportunity to teach a short family course for adults and children (age 5-8 years) at The Finnish Adult Education Institute. Our theme was animal stories and we explored this through art, dance, storytelling and illustration. First session was about painting portraits of animals, reading stories and getting to know each other.

Here are some of the cool animal portraits!

 

 

Our second session was about movement and dance improvisation. We also started storycrafting, a method for the children to invent their own stories. Based on these stories we would then illustrate our own picture books.

The children were in charge of the picture book process. Adults were helping them out by writing the text or illustrating the book with the child. The story was divided in three double spreads.

Here are the wonderfully inventive books the children made with their parents. I was given the permission to publish the books here. The stories were fun to read aloud at the end of the course and the children were very impressed (as were the adults, especially me!) by everybody's creations.

"The Little Cat" by Hertta (8 years)

The back cover text: "The little black cat finds a friend and and a home where she is loved. During the night the northern lights turn her fur into rainbow colours."

"Heavy Rocks" by Alvari (5 years) and his mother Virva

A story about how Hevisaurus (a very popular children's music band) got started. The humorous tale involves two boys, a pig, a rabbit and a "band mobile phone", a farm and a rock concert.

"The Lost Rabbits" by Saga (6 years) and her mother Sari

The book tells a story of three rabbits that get lost in the grass, but eventually find their way home to their mother. Happy ending involves eating delicious porridge and gingerbread biscuits.

A Christmas Story by Tuukka (5 years) and his mother Tarja

A happy story about the little boy Tuukka and his family. The illustrations had lots of details about electricity, switchboards and ita had also a Christmas Tree and Santa Claus.

Multitasking before holidays

My friend and author of Elsa picture books Kerttu Ruuska created a children's book blog and I made the illustration above for her home page. It's her flying on a story rug, as the blog is called "Lentävä tarinamatto" in Finnish, Flying Story Rug as my homemade translation.

My greeting cards arrived from the printer yesterday! Really nice quality, 300 g Munken Lynx paper and a small edition with digital printing. And a very good local printer as well, one I have used many times. Though we have a postal strike that can last for ages. Hopefully not...

Just to finish this post with a something new, here is a teeny tiny glimpse of something on my desk at the moment!