I have something to tell you...

You know how difficult it is to tell about something big that you have kept quiet about for a long time? You don't quite know how to bring it up or where to start, which is why I'm going to start right here with an awkwardly metaphorical approach:

If my life was a pie, illustration would eat one quarter of it. Another quarter would go to writing and the third one to random free time activities, hundreds of movies, tea drinking with friends and occasional sports. The last quarter would go to magazines. Magazines and books. Thinking, talking and dreaming about them.

In the past year, I've been working on my own very first independent magazine Dear Fashion Journal, which I have mentioned here a few times. However, next to that there has been also another baby in the making! This time, I've been lucky to be in the project with a good friend and colleague of mine, Laura de Jong, and a Dutch publishing company BIS that makes great books...awesome books, to be honest (and not even one teeny bit biased)! One of my favourites in their collection is a book series called Ridiculous Design Rules, which never fails to make me chuckle and nod my head in agreement.

Anyway, the book we have been working on is called Dear Fashion Diary, and it's name stands pretty much for what it is: a fashion diary and an offline blog letting you document your fashion life, discover your taste and become your own style curator. It consists of over 50 illustrated assignments that allow the readers to grab their scissors, pencils and glue sticks and get creative.

We wanted to make the diary to create a fun tool for people to get to know to their wardrobes and learn how they express themselves through fashion. Me and my wardrobe have been in a bit of a fashion slump for quite some time now, so I really can't wait until April when the diary comes out and I get to start using it myself as well!

If you're curious for more about the book, feel welcome to follow us and our updates on Facebook or Twitter! :)

Let me be your sidekick

I'm not really into mushy, overly romantic things, rose bouquets or heart shaped boxes of chocolate, but I do like to take the advantage of Valentine's day to have another a bit more special day in a year. This time, I wanted to give something small to my boyfriend and decided to draw him a card. The idea was actually inspired by him; when he doesn't use different variations of my name or call me "dude", he usually calls me his sidekick.

I made two different versions and ended up choosing the more simple option (on the left). The illustration was also part of the Valentine's day Illustration Rally and got featured with a selection of other sweetly illustrated Valentine's greetings.

 

Since I started roaming about the heart-shaped boxes of chocolate, I would like to add that even if I think they are mushy, I don't have anything against them (or their contents). In fact, I don't think chocolate can ever be a bad idea, no matter what kind of package it came in. Actually, my boyfriend has also surprised me with chocolate once by leaving a collection of M&M's and Kinder Buenos behind my door. They were wrapped inside a plastic bag with an anonymous note saying "don't eat them all at once" (which I of course did). I'm sure they couldn't have tasted any better even if they came in a fancy box.

Leopard-skin pill-box hat

My dad is very much into music. When he started playing guitar an odd ten years ago, he was playing every day, all the time until he would get abrasion on his finger nails. When we are listening to the radio on the car, he always challenges us to recognize artists and their songs with a music quiz. It was my dad who took us to Madonna's concert, but nonetheless, he doesn't listen to Lady Gaga or Top 40. Instead, he listens to the "legends of rock", prefers blues over electronic music and is the number one fan of Bob Dylan's.

This week, my dad turned 50 and I wanted to give him something a bit more original as a present. He has been trying to talk me and my sister (who studies art) into producing some Bob Dylan-related artwork for quite some years already, so I took the hint and decided to illustrate something inspired by Bob Dylan's lyrics. I ended up choosing a song from "Blonde On Blonde", one of my dad's favourite albums, and picked the brilliantly sarcastic lyrics of a song called "Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat". (Before grabbing my pencil, I read through some analysis on the meaning of the song. Apparently it's about Edie Sedgwick and her lifestyle after becoming the muse of Andy Warhol.)

So, here's what came out of it: an illustration featuring the first lines of the song. The style is pretty feminine, but I thought it would be okay - my mom doesn't really like Bob Dylan's music, but she's probably going to be okay with displaying a piece of it in the house if it's concealed within a cutesy package. A win-win situation!

   

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!

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

 

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?

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!

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.

Happyhappyjoyjoy

Hello baby, welcome to the world!

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".