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!

Still Life with Birds Part II

I did three more gouache paintings for Putinki Oy, enjoying every minute of painting them. This one is the brightest one, with a lot of fiddly details.
I know that so many illustrators use computer especially when designing patterns. Well, I stick to my ruler and pencil to get the patterns in line and correct shape and size...I feel it is more lively this way, hand-painted with little mistakes and imperfections.
More birds coming up for Christmas and winter season. Summer is always the best season to work on winter subjects with nice, cool thoughts about snow and ice. I'm looking forward to summer, my favourite season of the year!

My messy, messy desk

I love painting with gouache, but I don't appreciate having to wash those plastic palettes all the time. That's why have three of them, and I use their backsides too! Right now I'm working on more still lifes with birds and I'm really enjoying it. Especially now that it's finally spring in this cold part of the globe.

Vappu!

                                            
                                  Happy May Day to you all! Hauskaa Vappua!

Music, music, music...

I browsed through my stuff on the computer looking for illustrations with musical instruments. Here are a few in a chronological order starting from 2004. Personal projects, educational publishing, artwork from my exhibitions, Christmas card and even one Santa Claus!

Pencil line, mixed media, oil pastels, gouache, touch of Photoshop...and an obsession to get the musical instruments drawn as correctly as possible with the artist's freedom and simplification. Tuba and euphonium are almost painful to draw, but excellent practice for patience!

 

Sketching new characters

I think one of the most enjoyable parts as an illustrator is to design new characters based on the author's text. I just take out my pencil and some paper, make notes on the script and think about how the characters look like, how they behave, move, react etc. I think about their age, clothing, facial expressions, body language and just try different things. Sometimes if I get stuck, I feel or act them out, try different moves, positions and so on. If I need to work fast, I spend less time on this, which is always a shame.

When I start to work on the final illustrations, I seem to lose the flow of casual, quick pencil lines and the movement they create. But when I get to put down the colours, it's probably even more enjoyable! Well, my point is, I love it all...

What shall I do today?

Royal Wednesday

Queen Elisabeth I

King Louis XIV

Today's favourite colours are crimson, vermilion and scarlet red. According to Wikipedia, scarlet is closer to red than vermilion that has a slightly more orange flavour. Crimson has a tiny bit of blue mixed in. These are my three top reds at the moment. Bright, cool pink gets the fourth place!

Travelling in space

This weekend I finished all the illustrations for the book I've been working on for the last two months. I even got to illustrate this classic space rocket above. In a minute I'm going to the publisher to take all the original artwork in to be scanned.
Then I might enjoy an ice-cream in the city centre as the sun is finally shining in Helsinki! Temperature is still below zero, but you can feel the sun's 'heat' in your face if you concentrate very hard...

Song about a leggy man

Today I've been working on this illustration for a song about a leggy man and his bowlegged wife ("Pitkäsäärinen" in Finnish). What an earworm it is! The song comes with step by step illustrations on how to play it with a friend. It's quite an addictive game. I find it hard to concentrate on drawing when the song is in my head and my arms and hands want move about. I just want to get it right, that's all!