Kontti

I've been looking trough my old work that I found in  my pile of sketches and stuff and came across some of very early projects of mine. This was my first year assignment, one of our first design projects with a photoshoot. The year was 2010 and the objective was to make an outfit in collaboration with Kontti, which is a charity shop uphold by the red cross.
Our job was to design an outfit that's made out of secondhand clothing. We could use whatever materials we could find in the secondhand shop.

Sparassidae

Sparassidae- The hunter and the hunted

WE had a photoshoot collaboration course with some of the photography students from our school. The idea was to shoot graduation project editorial. Each graduating student got paired up with a photography student and under Lauri Erikssons direction we had one day to figure out our editorial concept and next week it was already shooting time.

I think that the photoshoot went well and I owe a huge thank you to Jirina and our models for their hard work.

 Valokuvaus/Phorography - Jirina Alanko
Meikki/Make-Up/Hiukset/Hair - Viviann Raudsepp
Malli/Model - Piergiorgio & Tuomo/Brand

KOE14 Thank you

It was a great show!

Thank you everybody who came to see it. 

The show will be soon found on youtube.

KOE 14

Our fashion show is just around the corner
http://muva.fi/koe14/

 Our school is having our annual fashion show next week and this year it was our class that planned it. Our main theme for the show was to play with the idea of nature vs artificial, children vs adults and minimalism vs maximalism, ordinary vs extraordinary. The name KOE can be translated from Finnish as an experience, a spectacle. The show will include final collections of the graduating students as well as creations from other fashion students from 1st, 2nd and 3rd year.

UNI the anthology

Each year I and a couple of my friends organize a zine in which new and young talented artists get an opportunity to show off their work. The continuous theme of the zine is "dreams", which is also a direct translation from Finnish word "Uni". Every year we choose a new dream-themed subtitle for artists to work with. The anthology consists of illustrations and comics mainly made by Finnish artists, but recently others too have been participating in the project and it's great!
Third book is coming out this summer including stories and illustrations revolving around "phantasmagoria".

But this is how it all started.

Evangelion of Plastic Soup

It is finally over. I have gotten my thesis done and that has mainly been the reason for my absence from.. well almost everywhere.
But it's done, and I couldn't be more relieved. The last couple of days have been hectic since nearly everyone in our class has been sewing non-stop and printing and pressing their thesis books.
It's been plain insane.
 
The thesis or "graduation project" as we ought to say, contains a research part that we started already in November last year and based on that research we were asked to design a collection of 20 pieces.
I chose to research plastic and its effects on our environment.  As a visual inspiration I used one of my favorite anime: Neon Genesis Evangelion.The research started out with the idea of an apocalyptic world that was caused by mankind. I thought that with that idea, plastic would serve as a great example of environmental disaster waiting to happen. Basically, I started studying plastic, what was the status of plastic waste in the world and how it can be recycled into fashion/fabrics/textiles.

The research begun by looking for information about plastic waste and its environmental impact. Huge amount of plastic gets thrown into landscapes each year and because it does not biodegrade, it contaminates our surroundings and food.  Also it was quite disturbing to find out that there are huge garbage patches floating in the Pacific Ocean. I honestly had no idea that there was such a thing until I learned about it in "Trash to trend"-workshop. Even though plastic can be recycled into new products, there is still far too little of recyclable raw material collected to make it count.

The hardest part of the project was to find textiles made out of recycled polymers. It took me a while, but finally I did find the fabric that I needed, but was surprised how little of such textiles are on the market for a basic consumer. It seems that this kind of textile is just starting to arrive on the market.  
  

Cover shot by Jirina Alanko

Frostbite 2014

Desucon frostbite 2014
Overly exhausted after 8 hours of flight, 25 minutes of sleep, sick as hell.... I was finally home. And almost straight from the airport to Desucon frostbite. This years desucon was +18, so I wasn't expecting much people to attend it, but I was surprised how many there were in the end. Me and Annika had a table at an artis alley on saturday and pretty much spent all our time sitting there.

 We saw alot of great looking cosplayers and other creatures

Artistalley was quite fun. A lot of very sweet and odd people stopped by. Saw a lot of friends and made some new aquaintances. But mostly it was me and my friend fooling around. I was pleasantly surprised how many people had indie comics for sale. (and they'r great quality too) Hopefully we'll see some durning summer cons and I'll have a couple of my own projects to show off.

Dem New York experience

We lived next to Empire state building

We went on a class trip to New York this week.

Every year the graduating class in our school, gets a trip to any desired destination. Our class was thinking between Hong Kong and New York, but in the end we decided to go with New York, since it's one of the fashion capitals. We did go there durning fashion week, but unfortunatelly did not get to see the shows.

But that did not make the trip any less awesome. Me and my friend Linda found so many awesome shops and places! Food took most of our money right from the beggining, but after making some crucial decisions (like buying food from deli [which was delicious btw] to save some money) we could spend it all on comic books, fabrics and special FX makeup and prosthetics. And that we did.
We became very poor, but oh so much happier.

Trash to trend

Tallinn, two weeks of intencive course regarding trash, fashion and what we can do about it.
We went on a trip, not knowing really what to expect. There was very little information about the innovation camp, but thankfully it all cleared once we started the course. There were students from arounf five schools around northern europe: from Denmark, Estonia and ofcourse from Finland (us form Lahti and students from University of Lapland)
The course was an introduction to a ecological and ethical fashion that we, future designers could practice in our design and concepts. 

The idea was to divide into groups and design and produce in full scale or ½ scale a collection based on a given premise. My group had an assigment to design outfits using zero-waste technique and preproduction rollends. The whole class went on a trip to various estonian factories and manufacturers to get the leftover fabric for the project. It was beautiful. 
We left early in the morning from the center of Tallinn by bus. Just half an hour at the city limit we were surrounded by fields of frozen arable crops. 

On weekend, I had an opportunity to drag myself around the city. Even though the city is really familiar to me, it was fun just to go around aimlessly from one part of it to another or scout for new places with my classmates. One of the surprising places was Lennusadam. There was a Titanic
exhibition going on, which was actually very well built. It had everything from replicas of the cabins in the ship to huge ice walls. The ticket was great, each ticket had a name of pasengers of Titanic and
a short story, why they were traveling and at the end of the exhibition you could search for the passenger from a list to find out if they survived or not.

The course ended with a presentation of our concept and samples of what we had created. 
Our concept evolved into a japanese styled futuristic zerowaste collection. Our main look was hakama shorts and a padded vest as well as a couple of ½ scale designs. 

Violet and purple

Some illustrations that I have done. Mainly in purple because Saints Row 4 is a pretty good game.

 

Here's my character, Mr. President. 

More illustrations in here: 

http://gothfuu.deviantart.com/

The Netherlands Experience

Amsterdam in pictures. Well, mainly street art.

It was awesome.

Uni the Anthology 2---making of

Uni printing. Now this was interesting. It all started because we couldn't get answers from the print houses. It was a bummer. So we decided to do the job ourselves.
We have awesome printing equipment at school and very knowing people so it was in the end quite easy. We printed over 100 copies of the journal. Not everything went well, we made a couple on mistakes and had to fight with the stapler only so many times, but at least now we are ready.

Complete with twelve young talents work, this year was "nightmare" themed. They had complete freedom in creating their illustrations or one-shot comics and we had gotten a lot of awesome looking work. Most of the participants are from Finland, but we did have a canadian artist in this project too. I am very excited that this project did come out in time and is looking good. Hope that next part will be as awesome as this one was!

UNI2 the nightmares

We did learn that nothing should be ever left till the last minute.

Helsinki's comic festival 2013

Comic festival was a blast. it was my second comic festival selling at small print tent. I was sitting next to my friends Laura Heikkala http://heikala.deviantart.com/ and Petrushttp://kitchen-bitch.deviantart.com/
The weather was nice and warm, although it was really windy. But that is pretty normal in Helsinki.

 

I saw a lot of friends of mine whom I haven't seen in a while. Speaking of which, Wolf http://susiajasoraa.sarjakuvablogit.com/ was being interviewed on Sunday regarding his graphic novel "Miska pähkinä" about a transgender guy and his social experiment in Britain. It's a great novel and I recommend it to anyone and everyone.

Our UNI²  was on sale there too, as well as my mini comic "stupid comic 0" which is a compilation of one-page comics about stupid stuff and daily life.
.

Material manipulation I

We had an awesome course of fabric manipulation at school, where we could test out some various printing techniques. Usually you see these techniques used in t-shirt prints, especially in the nineties.

We tested glitter print, flock/fuzz print and vinyl-like foil print. The flock print was hardest of these three, since you had to be very careful with the temperature and the use of glue. If the temperature of hot iron is not hot enough it will rip the transfer fuzz/flock or the glue might not stick to the flock. But after a while of practice it gets easier to understand what temperatures to use and how to attach the flock.

The foil print was the easiest one of the three. It works a bit like the flock print, but you don't have to be as careful with the temperatures as with the flock. The print surface comes out smooth and shiny.
The glitter print was on the other hand a bit of a mess, since it's just plain glitter that you spinkle on top of you pattern made of glue.

The only problem with these patterns are the fact that they are not durable. Patterns are almost gone after a couple of washes, which is a shame really. I guess there are some room for improvements to make regarding the textile glue, so that it could make a durable and washable, cool looking fabric.

We were asked to print a pattern of our choise on a fabric of our choise using one of these techniques.
I chose the classical japanese pattern called "seikaiha". It was originally a Chinese pattern that was designed to illustrate oceans and seas on maps.
It's not an easy pattern to print. Targeting was hell. I don't have a picture of the finished fabric, but a couple of pictures from the process.

UNI the nightmare poster

UNI is a project me and my friends started last year. It's a comic and illustration anthology from various artists. The first journal featured six Finnish artists (including my work) with their interpretation of the theme "dreams". That is where the name of the journal comes from, since in Finnish uni means dream or sleep.

Since the first journal was pretty successful, we decided to make it a continuous project. The new tome will revolve around nightmares and we have ten wonderful artists from various countries contributing in it. The journal will come out september 8th this year at Helsinki Comics Festival 

http://www.sarjakuvafestivaalit.fi/in-english

This illustration served as an alternative cover for the journal but will be featured as a poster. It was an awesome piece to make. I really haven't made detailed watercolor works before so it was somewhat a challenge on top of that it was supposed to be made in a couple of days. I used watercolor, acrylic paint and watercolor pencils on A3 watercolor paper.