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.

Helsinki Book Fair and our new book!

Last weekend was the Helsinki Book Fair; four days packed with events, interviews and book sales for all book-loving public to enjoy. Our latest picture book "Elsa ja Lauri matkustavat" (Elsa and Lauri go travelling") made it just in time from the printer to be presented and sold at the fair by Oppi&ilo, our publisher. 

Kerttu and I had a book reading session and afterwards we created paper airplanes with the children and their parents. It's always a great pleasure to see children listening to a story. Their attentiveness and concentration is amazing to watch. And the colourful paper planes were flying around the children's play area. Apparently some of the planes travelled all the way to Italy, Greece and Dubai, and even to Minecraft world.

I was also taking part in Kuvittajat's (The Association of Finnish Illustrators) stand and spend a couple of hours there as a cashier. Next to me was illustrator Maija Hurme drawing mini portraits of people for free. This caused quite a queue, so I jumped in to help out and did a few quick portraits myself (see the very poor quality photos...). It was nice to talk to people while drawing.  I'd love to that kind of thing more often, though without cashier duties at the same time!

Masterclass by Svjetlan Junaković

It's been a while since my last update. Yesterday I finished a picture book that I have been working on this summer. I have also been enjoying summer holidays, although this summer has been one of the coldest in 50 years!

In June I had a chance to participate in a two-day illustration masterclass taught by Croatian artist, illustrator and sculptor Svjetlan Junaković. He is one of my favourite artists, so being taught by him was a privilege. He is such an inspiring, enthusiastic teacher and a charismatic person and storyteller.

From one portrait to another, magic!

We painted with mixed media, using acrylics, gouache and whatever pencils and crayons we had in hand. I really enjoyed this technique and had lots of fun with it. Th theme for the workshop was "Portraited in Illustration". We interpreted well-known fairytale characters with our own stories behind them.

The fish on the left was painted by Svjetlan on top of many different faces.

My Princess with the Pea. She's had enough of the fuss and decides to get rid of it.

Princess is feeding the Pea to Little Red Riding Hood's Wolf.

Workshop at school

This week I was teaching a workshop in my son's class. I told the children about illustrator's work and the process of making a picture book. I showed some sketches, original illustrations and books. Then they illustrated their own mini books. They had already written the text with their teacher. The title was "When I grow, I'm going to be...". 

The occupations included a few hairdressers, a teacher and a doctor, but also several artists and even one illustrator. An arctic researcher was the most unusual one, I think. Some wonderful little books they made in a very short time. Loved it!

 

 

 

Supercool swimming pool!

Here are some wonderful photos from one of the kindergartens we have visited so far with Elsa-workshops.
We started the art project together with the children by reading the book about Elsa's first visit to an indoor swimming pool. Then we did some painting with marbles to create the water in different shades of blue. Also some frogs were born, ready to dive into the pool water.
We instructed the group's own teachers to continue building a swimming pool area with coloured tiles around the water and even adding extra characters and elements to the 3D-pool. And this is one of the projects finished. These children created a truly fantastic swimming pool, I'm so impressed and happy!

Multi-coloured swimming pool tiles.

This frog (bottom right) meets a surfer!

Lifebuoy has saved one swimmer...jump board tower on the right!

Swimming pool tiles in progress.

Helsinki Book Fair and Elsa workshops

Last weekend I was performing with Trio Pullakka, our band that is really a quartet. This was part of Elsa book reading session at Helsinki Book Fair children's area. Our next "gig" will be in a week's time at our local library.
We have started our 'Elsa workshop tour' at pre-schools and kindergartens with Kerttu. So far it's been really exciting. We have planned two different workshops, one for each book. Both of the workshops start with reading one of the Elsa books.
We have had imaginary trip through the winter forest to the ice-skating rink with some of the children for Elsa luistelemassa -book ("Elsa goes ice-skating"). This workshop is the one with movement, improvisation and learning about the basic skating techniques through play and dance. With others we have started to build a swimming pool by painting water with marbles and making frogs. The swimming pool project will continue so that the group can build their own 3D pool with water, frogs, tiles and maybe even slides and jump boards for the swimmers.

Workshops for pre-school children

Elsa celebrating the Wihuri Foundation's grant

Me and Elsa's author Kerttu received a grant to go to local kindergartens and teach workshops based on Elsa books. There will be two different ones, both with a book reading moment and activities. The ice-skating workshop will be the one with a lot of movement and play relating to the subject. The swimming workshop is about creating a swimming pool together with different art materials and techniques.
It means that the two of us will be as busy as bees for the next two months!

Tomorrow we celebrate Elsa's name day in Finland. Well, one day too soon, Happy Elsa's Day!

Oh yes, Elsa has a very sweet little brother!

 Here is a link to Elsa's own Facebook page (all in Finnish): Elsa books.

Cards coming soon...

My "Still Life with Birds" -series get three new cards published by Putinki Oy. They should be in print soon, I'm looking forward to it. My birds are also appearing in christmas cards, which I'll be revealing later in this blog!
Another busy and fun workshop for children last weekend at Vuotalo festival. The theme was...you'd never guess.....BIRDS!

Workshop weekend

Yesterday three preschool groups from a nearby nursery school visited the exhibition. They were pretty excited to be in an art gallery. We had a workshop where everybody could do their own fantastic fairytale bird.
I had designed bird stencils and had them made in a laser cutting studio Laser-Riimikko. The children seemed to really enjoy painting and came up with some amazing artwork in less than half an hour. This weekend I'll have two more workshops with children aged 4-13 years.

Birds made by children of Impivaara nursery school