26 Dec 2012

So this is Christmas...

...and what have you done?

I never really got around to banging the drum for Dear Fashion Journal here, at least not after it got published a few weeks ago. Well, anyway, it's out now and available for ordering! It took me pretty much the whole year to get this baby out, but I'm very happy I did it. :) If you wish to have yourself a copy of this fashion magazine, which - thanks to all the great illustrators I got to work with - is quite an eye candy, just follow this link. As a little extra, I have made it my mission to attach a personal handwritten note to every copy that is ordered online!


Other than working, I have been eating chocolate in Holland, eating chocolate in Finland, wrapping and preparing Christmas presents. This year, I gave my sister a really pretty tote bag made by a brilliant illustrator and Dear Fashion Journal's copy editor Suzanna Knight, and one lucky (?!?) friend of mine got a jar of home-baked cookies. They might have become hard as stone, but nonetheless they were made with love and without any milk (she was recently diagnosed with lactose intolerance). Besides, even a hard cookie softens when dipped into tea!


And so this is Christmas, 
I hope you have fun, 
the near and the dear ones,
the old and the young!

16 Oct 2012

Dear Fashion: Final Countdown

If I had an ukulele band, we would rock this day by playing Europe's legendary "Final Countdown" to you. Unfortunately, I don't have a band ...

Read the rest of the story here: Dear Fashion: Final Countdown

 

11 Sept 2012

Serious and less serious problems




Yesterday, the saga of Handwriting & Fonting got a new exciting sequel called Capital Letters for Headers. I still need to fix a few errors before it will work properly with all the commas, periods and such, but other than that I'm quite pleased with it! Houston had a spaceship and the spaceship had some problems, I have a typeface and the typeface has some faults, but lucky me, those are more fixable and less life-threatening than the ones of Houston.

I hope?

20 Aug 2012

Dear blog,

Thank goodness you aren't one of those electronic diaries the modern kids might have these days. Otherwise you would probably start nagging at me like a Tamagotchi back in the good old 90s for neglecting you. (Yes, I had one of those toys. Liked it, although mine seemed to have some serious overdependency issues - I couldn't even join my parents to go to the supermarket without taking that peeping bugger with me.)

In the last two months, the following things have happened:

1. My website decided to start collaborating with me and is now happily online, leading an errorless life. Hurray!

2. I graduated and am now officially a Bachelor of Fashion Technology. Wondering what that means? Yep, I am, too.

3. I've been living a double life, working part-time (as a secret agent, of course) and dedicating the rest of my days to putting the final touches on the soon to be born magazine, Dear Fashion Journal, about which I've been writing a bit also here, here and here. Dear Fashion also has a website and a blog now, and you're warmly welcome to get nosy and take a peek at www.dearfashionjournal.com. To all the fellow Social Media nerds I am happy to announce that the journal has also been blessed with facebook and twitter accounts, where we'll be chirping about our days and posting nice links we run into.

http://www.dearfashionjournal.com
Summasummarum, that's what we say in Finnish when we want to sum up and finish our ramblings. Now I will go and deal with my laundry and some other fabulous house chores before proceeding to the more creative and Dear Fashion related tasks of the day.

Talk to you sooner, not later!

15 Jun 2012

Website, why art thou being so difficult?

"We’re going to be inserting the following snippets of code on the lines in-between these tags. Now you’re ready to make your WordPress Child Theme sing.


… not literally, of course. That would be annoying."


Whilst updating my online portfolio - or actually creating an entirely new one - I have been running into some quite hilarious Wordpress tutorials...or maybe I'm just finding them unusually funny in my desperation of trying to collaborate with very uncollaborative navigation bars and CSS style sheets. 

I swear it's not me, it's them.



31 May 2012

Happyhappyjoyjoy

Hello baby, welcome to the world!

Dear Fashion Journal

14 May 2012

Essyello and facing face-fears

Last week (or was it the week before..? I've been breathing too much of glue fumes lately whilst working on my thesis, so pardon me for the lack of brain cells.) Sauling, the designer behind Essyello Jewellery asked if I would like to illustrate an image for the packaging of the brand's new hair accessory. I got to know Sauling when we were both working on Odd magazine and we have been friends ever since, so I was more than glad to spend my Friday night listening to Keane and illustrating material for her own line. Besides, I was asked to illustrate a face, which is one of those subjects that I don't like to draw, so it was a good opportunity to pay a visit to the outskirts of my comfort zone - long live discomfort and challenging yourself! (Opportunity for a slogan T-shirt business here!)

The end result was very different from my usual style, but I was pretty pleased with it. Seeing that I could quite easily come up with something more sleek and less naive than my personal work was great, especially since I haven't had time to try out different styles and techniques in ages. I wish I could do it more in the future, so it has now been added on top of my to-do list right after "get in touch with someone important ( a president/mom/God/...) who can make days last for 25 hours".

19 Apr 2012

One hello and three points of happiness

The last weeks (or actually the last months) I've been busy working on the bookazine, playing with the layouts, swearing at the layouts, co-creating illustrations with my best buddy Sarah and driving my boyfriend nuts (he probably wouldn't use the term 'go nuts', but I'm sure he was at least a teeny bit annoyed) by obsessing about the whiteness-colour ratio on the pages of the book.

But anyhow, today has been a very nice day, and I have collected three Happiness Points.

The first one was found waiting for me behind the door when I came home. It was a package with a certain Smith Journal inside it. In case you haven't heard of it, Smith Journal is a fairly new publication for discerning gents and ladies who like reading about discerning gents. It's also the first men's magazine I have ever had on my bookshelf, and concluding from the way the first few pages made my heart melt, it might even become one of my all time favourite publications. One Happiness Point!

Photobucket

The second Happiness Point smelled like fresh ink, as today was the day that I marched to a printer to print a mini-version of my bookazine baby. Officially, it will be born this summer with a healthy weight of about 95 pages (some of which are still in progress), but being able to leaf through a miniature of it already now makes me bounce off the walls. Two Happiness Points! Illustration on the image here is made by Daria, one of my favourite collage artists.

Photobucket

And the third Happiness Point? Well, that one comes simply from knowing that I've still got some chocolate stored in my drawer.

Not for long, though... (insert evil laughter here)

16 Apr 2012

Monday

Today I:

...ran into Keri Smith's blog.
...thought that Keri Smith is actually a guy.
...realized that despite her favicon Keri Smith is a girl, and her blog is awesome.

Check it out, it's worth it! Keri Smith's blog

self destruct

19 Feb 2012

Sneezy Greetings


I was actually supposed to do a belated Valentine's post, but - lucky for you - I got ill, which means that instead of drowning you in an overload of delayed digital hearts, this will be my attempt in begging for pity points.

My thesis aka editing an entire bookazine has kept me busy and away from leading a double life as a part-time illustrator. This week, we are having our second Design Bootcamp to work on some layouts. It's hard work, but loads of fun too: in between all the serious photoshopping and indesigning, we listen to Spice Girls (oh yes..) and this:



But anyway, the point of this post was probably to let the cyberspace know that despite of being ill and having my head full of god knows what, I am still alive and kicking. And so is that doll, an old friend from last year.