Holiday!

Tomorrow I'll be leaving for a week's holiday. This is a good moment to show you the cover illustration for the third Elsa book, as it happens to be on the theme of travelling. Though now it's not just Elsa, but also her little brother Lauri, travelling abroad. Such a convenient holiday trip when it comes to looking for reference!

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!

 

 

 

Happy May Day!

Happy May Day! 

Iloista vappua!

Botanic garden sketches

Last weekend I participated on a two-day course drawing plants at Kaisaniemi Botanic Garden's glasshouses in Helsinki. Well, only the first day was sketching on the spot. On the second day of the course we were asked to paint anything we like based on our sketches from the previous day. I got the jungle fever of some kind with my oil pastels. It was really enjoyable to just draw what you feel and have enough time to do it. So definitely more of this soon, I hope.

Blank sheets of paper waiting to be filled

I'm starting to work on the next Elsa picture book this very week (finally!) after finishing another book project. Empty papers stare at me on my desk. Some other creative projects will follow on the side, that's for certain. Sometimes it's very difficult to focus on the one thing you're supposed to work on. Mind wanders to faraway places. Like today. Luckily I have a very hard working illustrator sharing the studio with me. It makes me not to want to be an idle dreamer all day...

Spring dance

I wish everybody a happy weekend, beautiful springtime and lots of fun and funky dance moves as shown here by Elsa and her brother (our Facebook page reached 300 likes, so I drew this little picture to celebrate!). 

Here's link to our page, all in Finnish though:

Elsa Book Series 

"Sun is shining, the weather is sweet..."

"...Make you want to move your dancing feet" (Bob Marley)
 It's a wonderful, sunny winter day in Helsinki today, I can smell the spring already! Really nice projects to work on, so I'm starting with plenty of sketching and research. The guys in the picture above are part of one of them.
Well, I just better get cracking instead of fiddling on the computer...

"Illustrator as Author" mini seminar

Today we had a special treat for children's book and picture book people. Professor Martin Salisbury from Cambridge School of Art was the keynote speaker at a mini seminar organised by Aalto University's Graphic Design Unit. There were also interesting speakers from Finnish picture book field, such as Ville Tietäväinen, Kristiina Louhi and Maija & Anssi Hurme. It's such a rare thing to have something like this arranged in Helsinki. I wish that this is the beginning of more events like this for picture book enthusiasts, researchers, illustrators, authors and 'picture book makers'!

My partner, co-worker and fantastic illustrator/graphic designer Jussi made these limited palette designs below based on my pictures. We are having new business cards printed, and there was some extra space to fill in on the sheets of offset paper, with limited two-colour palette.
It's fun to see what it looks like, when somebody else has done the computer fiddling on my illustrations... The one on top is from a pencil sketch I had forgotten about. The one below is based on a piece of artwork I did for my exhibition two years ago.

 

 

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.

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.