Recent work and a few words about pricing and mentoring

It’s been way too long since my last update, but I have good reasons: I’ve had so much work the past 10 months!

During the Autumn 2018 I started work with a film project, and it is still not finished, although the ending is in sight now. I joined a team making five short films about medieval times in Finland, Ostrobothnia to be more precise. I’m illustrating the films, and as soon as they are out on the web, I’ll tell you more about them.

Helena and the bear. From the first film in the series.

In January I joined an amazing company called MiTale, where I will be doing Narrative Design. We are continuing the work with a speech therapy application, that we started already in 2015. But we are also cooking up some other very exciting narrative games, playing around with mixed reality, and visual storytelling is our focus. I’ve found my creative home and my team, and finally I get to realize my dreams about working with visual storytelling and games.

Parts of our team took part in the Energy Hackathon in Turku last weekend, and we got an honorary mention, especially for the narrative design of our game concept and presentation! This felt very encouraging for the future.

Taru, the main character in our game concept at Energy Hackathon 2019.

I am also particularly proud of being part of a book project: editing, illustrating and designing the book We see you. The book contains texts by thirty writers with different backgrounds and their experiences with being refugees, asylum seekers or being engaged with volunteering or human rights. The book was published in the end of March 2019, and the other two editors and I are now doing interviews and visits at events talking about the book. I hope the book will spread out and be read by many.

Book cover, We see you, Schildts & Söderströms 2019.

For me personally it is very important that my work reflects my values, and currently human rights and the climate crisis are the two most important challenges we have. All of my work is connected in different ways to these two issues.

I am still welcoming new projects, and especially if you are interested in collaborating with MiTale. If you are interested in working with me as an illustrator, I am interested in hearing about your project. But since I have no acute need for more work at the moment I only take on very special projects, and they also need to be well financed.

I have also updated my pricing (and I still believe being open about it is the best way to go!): My hourly wage for illustration, graphic design, writing or consultations is 75 euro / hour (+ 24 % VAT).

When it comes to talks and workshops it is now possible to book me through Läscentrum/Lukukeskus (information in Swedish)!

However, if you are a young aspiring artist, feel free to contact me! I am open to mentoring, and love to help people out in this tough business… I try to answer all requests, and also if you are in Turku, a lunch meeting is a fun way to pick my brain 😉

And as always, if you want to contact me, send an email to jennykwiik@gmail.com

Have a great summer!

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains

That is a quote by Rosa Luxemburg, and since I saw it last year I have been thinking it is very descriptive of my attitude towards life. I move on and I need to be free. I also keep creating new things.

It’s time for a blog update, enjoy because they don’t come very often, haha!

Last Spring I finished work on the Literature game I was working on with a writer and a programmer, and a larger team of experts and support organizations. The game itself will be launched next month, so I will write more about it later. I have been using this experience of co-creating a serious game for my Master’s thesis in Service Design, that I hope to complete this Autumn. The thesis writing got delayed because I simply had too much work and big changes in my personal life in the Spring to focus on it. But now it is moving onward.

A visualization of the thesis process

I also have a new studio and work space from July onwards. It feels amazing to have a large room all to myself.. white walls to fill with ideas and works in progress. But the funny thing is that I currently mostly work digitally, so I still sit cooped up in one corner of the room with my laptop. I hope I can take time to paint more at some point and really use the space that I have now.

My current large project is illustrating a history book. So far the work and collaboration with the writer, AD and editor has been amazing and so much fun. But also hard work. The past week I have put in hours on creating an old 17th century map. It really brought out my perfectionist streak when it comes to visual design…

Searching for the right style for the history book – some fictional parts of the text bring out nature and animals…

 

Meanwhile I am also doing the layout of another easy to read adaptation of the Moomin books, and drawing simple illustrations for a web based language learning material.

I also really enjoy drawing in this simple and colorful style 🙂

And as always some exciting and very secret projects are bubbling under and moving along in their own pace in my mind and together with some awesome people (usually it’s writers). What I have noticed over the years is that what I really love about illustration is that it is collaborative. I get inspired by others, by meeting new people, and forming new work partnerships. They shape me and push me into new directions, and I hope they feel the same excitement I do when we work towards creating something new together.

So. Moving forward with renewed energy and passion for my work.

Concept Illustrations – My Little Light

Last summer I worked on illustrations for one of my personal projects – an art game/visual novel-kind of thing. It has been on a break the whole of autumn, but I took some time now to finish up 10 of the images. The project is still very open and developing organically. I’m not sure what the end result is going to be, but I want the story to be a branching narrative, where the reader can choose between different paths. But I think I at least have the visual style ready. For now, the project will take a rest again, and I will see when I have more time to develop it further (since I have some very exciting other projects this Spring to focus on). The next task would be to finish the script completely. And I noticed that while making the illustrations, I felt a need to change the story too. So the two elements of text and visuals are going to develop together.

Personal game art project, 2016

Personal game art project, 2016

Personal game art project, 2016

Sanalanka – best educational application!

Yesterday the Sanalanka Speech Application team took part in the Turku ICT ShowRoom, and we got an honorary prize for best educational application! See more information on our Facebook page.

This was amazing news, and I’m very happy to be part of this team. Hopefully the prize will mean that the application will get funding and that we can keep developing it – because it is an amazing idea, and we have an amazing team making it!

Team receiving the prize

Natasha, Olli and I at our stand.

Lots of opportunities to try out the demo! Cute stickers!

February update

Hi!

I’ve been a busy little bee, the last couple of months. Juggling a staggering amount of projects and searching for new ones at the same time, is time consuming and not very easy at all. But things are looking up, and the future looks bright!

On the studies side, I’ve completed 15 ETCS in Service Design courses last autumn, and now I’m in the middle of a course called Marketing Skills. I’m mostly focusing on developing my company brand in the course project. Very fun and interesting work! Later in the Spring I will attend a class on Future Research – and area that has interested me for a long time. I’ve started writing my Master’s thesis for my degree programme, and my working topic is “Drawing the Future of Illustration”. In the thesis I will focus on my own artist brand, where I want to develop it, and how I see the future of my business.

And then work work work…

My work illustrating an easy to read adaption of the prize winning fantasy novel Maresi by Maria Turtschaninoff has been very fun and challenging. I am also doing the graphic design, basically the whole visual layout of the book. I would say I am a bit over halfway done with it now, and the work is due to be finished for printing in June. It will be published by Lärum Förlag in August 2016.

The Speech Therapy Application demo that I’m doing script and graphics for, is soon finished – it is final crunch time at the moment. It will be showcased in the ICT-showroom in March. This work has been an absolute joy, especially the collaboration with the wonderful team! The app and game has raised a lot of interest, which is expected: the idea to make fun games for kids to play, while doing speech therapy is brilliant. There will also be development of technical innovations in the app. I’m very happy to be part of the project, and am hoping to be able to keep developing the app with our awesome team!

And Underworld Kitchen is also under active development again. I’m doing ten more characters, and once again I get to tinker with pixels, and I LOVE IT! I’ll also be doing some environment concepts for the game.

I’ve been teaching comic book drawing on Thursday evenings, and I’m really enjoying coming up with new exercises and experimenting on the students… I’ve been teaching academic subjects for many years, but now I really think I’ve found what I really should be doing when it comes to education. Teaching a more practical subject, like drawing and comics, is just so much fun! And I feel I can really develop as a leader, facilitator and interaction designer at the same time.

Exciting times. The light is returning in the North and life goes on.

Sanalanka – Speech Therapy Tool

As of October I’m doing story writing and graphics for an application project called Sanalanka (“Word Thread” in Finnish).

The goal is to create an interactive book for tablets. The app will have researched speech therapy methods baked into a fun and engaging story with minigames that develop childrens’ language and speech. It will first be made for Finnish speaking children aged 0-3 and 4-6 (two levels). There are four programmers, three speech therapists, three graphic artists involved, and the project is also a Turku University IT student project (Capstone). The prototype is due in March 2016, and the app will then be developed for the open market.

The game studio that will publish the app is called Red Nettle Studio, and I will also do other collaborations with them. Here you can read more about the app. And soon we will go public with our Facebook page. I’m very excited to be part of this project!

Fairy tale girls

In my last blog post I said I have more good news. And I sure do!

I got a grant from The Finnish Association for Illustrators, that I’ve been a member of for eight years already. I haven’t applied for their working grants before, and in April I got the idea that my Goldilocks illustration could use some company. I already had a contact to a publisher who publishes easy to read books for all ages, and so I pitched them a story book with my illustrations. The fairy tales I’ve picked out will all have a girl protagonists. However, another author who knows more about easy to read texts will do the writing.

So in September and onwards I’ll be focusing on fairy tales! I’m so excited about this, it’s a dream come true. Ever since I was young I’ve adored classical fairy tale illustration, especially artists from the Nordic countries: John Bauer, Hans Arnold, Theodor Kittelsen, Rudolf Koivu, Kay Nielsen, Björn Landström and Tove Jansson of course. Now I will have a chance to make my own mark among these giants.

But the summer is all pixel art and games (I’ll update you on progress soon! Some awesome characters are forming as we speak). Goldilocks will have to wait a few months more…

Goldilocks is already available as a print: Check my Society6-shop!

Games and studios

A lot has been going on this Spring! Here’s an update:

I’m home again with my third child. I had a six week work period around March, and focused on writing and editing my novel, doing some illustration commissions, and applying for some new jobs. Next time I’m working full time again is in August, when the baby is going to daycare. And in August I’m going to start renting a studio! I’m so very excited about it. I’ll be able to do more traditional art again! I’ll have space and time! It really is a dream come true. I don’t know if I can keep the studio longer than 5 months, but we’ll see. It depends on the work situation.

Another very exciting thing is that I am now part of a new game development team, and we were accepted into a start up accelerator and will be getting help this summer to start a game company. We’re already working on the game that the team was formed around, and a demo is due in the end of August. Even though I don’t have a lot of time to work before summer, when the baby can be more with her dad, I’m loving every second I can spend on working on the game graphics. I’m learning to  make pixel graphics and I love it. I’m also very happy with the team and getting to know the others. Our meetings are a lot of fun, even though it’s a bit of a struggle to watch the baby at the same time, hah – she really wants to start walking now and puts everything in her mouth…

Well, I’ll soon have more good news, but I still have to keep silent about those for a little while.