Happy holidays!

Season's greetings! 

Iloista joulua!

Happy Holidays!

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!

More snowy card designs in the hope of SNOW

Here are two more of my Christmas card designs. I thought that maybe if I post them here now, we just might get the first snow soon. It's this hideously dark and chilly, damp month of November, my least favourite of all...The rest of my family thinks that November is great! For me, sleeping through the whole month is very attempting.

Below are some character drawings of my Santa Owls. Actually they have another name too. Someone from our Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design course thought, that these fellows look like the Tribbles from a famous episode in Star Trek!

Designing Christmas cards

I've been practising my new computer skills and worked on some Christmas card designs for this year. I usually make just one illustration, and paint it in gouache. Now I decided to go along with my new passion, surface pattern design, and combine some of that in the cards as well.
When you are so used to mixing your colours on a plastic palette instead of millions of options on computer screen, the possibilities can become a bit overwhelming. So I couldn't do just one card, but six...It's like playing a game with colours, motifs and compositions, because it's so much faster way of working. BUT I will also keep on painting with my lovely gouache paints for my other illustration work. Nothing beats mixing the paints and spreading them on smooth watercolour paper!

It's the time for...

...the little Christmas elves to appear everywhere, so keep your eyes open! This year's seasonal card is Elsa and her brother, dressed up in costumes for kindergarten's winter play. It's a dark time of the year, so I will light up the candles and eat ginger bread (or chocolate) with a cup of hot tea...preferably in a rabbit costume because it's warm and cosy.

Birds, I simply love them!

Here are all of my new card designs, finally! I have three new 'Still Life with Birds' -cards and six different designs for Christmas and wintertime, published by Putinki Oy. 

So, what is happening next? I'm busy working on two lovely projects that I will tell you more about in good time. For now, it's a secret.

Midsummer's eve soon!

Tomorrow I will leave the city for Midsummer weekend and finally throw away my winter coat in a lake and spend a couple of days together with my family in a little heaven called Johannislund in Kiikala. The old glass factory's village is by far the best place to be in the summer. A little bit later I'll be packing my paints and papers there too to complete the Christmas card illustrations I'm working on at the moment. Here's another lovely photo of my untidy desk at a very hot studio, where the snow is luckily only on paper!