Well so much from writing every single day... I missed one day already! But I have an excuse. My good friend Hanu is visiting and yesterday we spent the whole day hunting a perfect dress for a photoshoot we are going to do together. Hannu is a a hairdresser and I am about to model for him. My moment of Being Kate Moss.... That reminded me of my passion for fashion. Earlier in here I have only discussed about children's books. Children's books are NOT something I have always wanted to do. When I was younger I was convinced that I was going to be the next big thing in fashion! Heh. Gradually I grew older and learned myself better. The thing about fashion I like is the possibilityto have fun with clothes and ones appearance. I don't want to take it too seriously. It is a fun hobby and luckily I have friends like Hannu who enable me to continue that play.

This is the dress. I feel like a robot in it...

I also just recieved an email from Macmillan basically saying that I wasn't succesfull in their competition. Naturally I am dissapointed but I am still proud of my self that I did the whole book. I know there are lots of things I could still do better and it just made me want this even more. I am defianetly going to take part next year again! Now I really now how big the job is and can start thinking it already now! I had a small inspiration as well. Something reminded me of my very old fascination of beavers especially their curious nests and dams. What if there would be this beaver who is very interested of architecture and wants to built rather modern and funky looking nests! Before I wanted to be a fashion designer, when I was much much younger, I wanted to become an architect. Later I forgot that dream and nowdays I hardly even include buildings in my drawings. I am still very interested in buildings so I should defianetly take on a drawing project about those! A good challenge indeed!
These kind of educational pictures made me mega interested in beavers and especially their living arrangements. The entrance is from the water underneeth!!!! So cool!

boys will be boys and girls will be...FUCK THIS!

I am ridiculously tired now. Not too sure why. So today's blogging will not be that ambitious. This morning I had tutorial regarding my essey. I am intending to write about gender stereotypes in children's books, subject that really interests me. I found few good articles about the matter and even one study that tackles this very matter. I spent a long moment reading the whole study trough and even though it was full of figures and "boring" academic data it was interesting but also devastating to read about. Sadly the obvious conclusion seem to be that females are under-represented as characters in children's books and especially as main characters. Also worryingly old fashioned sexist role models were still rather common. Phew. This all made me pretty angry even though I had predicted the outcome already beforehand. And I gues getting angry made me tired. To cheer me up I will attach a picture from one of my favourite children's book characters. They are Heinähattu and Vilttitossu(Hay Hat and Felt Slipper) the 2 adventurous sisters created by Finnish authors Sinikka and Tiina Nopola.There is light in the end of the tunnel anyway.

towards final year!

Time flies. It's end of the second year and I HAVE to decide what to do next year. First I decided to use this unused blog for this me thinking. I am pretty anal when it comes to what I want to publish on my main blog http://hatebutterflies.blogspot.com/ and it's been mainly my work in there. I can NOT change it now. I just can't. So all this thinking goes in here and it goes here every bloody day from now on until the time of my presentation. I have to set up rules for myself!
Lets start then. Before I panic I have to break this down: Have I learned something about myself and my art practice? What have I done so far? What was sucsesfull, what I enjoyed doing and most importantly what it is I want to be doing from now on!?!?!?!
I defianetly enjoyed the projects I was ambitious about, the ones I felt proud of. These were the costume and group project and animation from last year. On second year I loved the publish project and the super stressfull and laborous Macmillan competition. Weirdly I seem to be on my element when under a decent stress. Oh dear. Who would have thought!
Common theme on my stuff is nonseriousness. My approach to pretty much anything is humour. I want to make people smile. I am interested in making the everyday life more enjoyable not necessarily creating something grand to grand occasions. I am not going to do any fine arty farty stuff. I want to do "real" things in "real" world.
Macmillan made me really think about kids as an audience. My stuff is naturally quite kid like possibly because I never really grew up. I loved my childhood and I don't understand why so many of the people seem to loose the joy and playfulness from their lives when they grow older. Society has too many unwritten rules for adults on how they should or should not behave. I don't mean that I would not take responsibilities that life brings in, I just refuse to loose the child in me. Actually it is pretty cool to be a grown up. Everything is possible now, it's just all up to you. But kids as an audience bring different responsibilities. If I just produce playfull and possibly kidlike work for grown ups it is different than doing it for kids. There are limitations on what you can actually do. What sort of values and messages you are delivering. Earlier I thought that this very fact was the reason I did not want to do children's illustrations but now it seems more and more that this very same fact is turning me towards the subject. I feel strongly about especially what sort of role models there are for children. Models of women and men in kids culture are still often worryingly old fashioned. Female characters seem to be still...well only female while males have other qualities as well.
Kids as humans are like blank canvases and I do think that people producing products for children carry a huge responsibility. Sadly it seems that especially toy industry only follows money and doesn't take this responsibility. In 2010 toy shops are full of pink exaggerated femine fluff for girls and macho action for boys. Situation is worse than 20 years ago!!!! While the parents believe to represent the generation of equality between the sexes the growing generation is feeded with extreme sexist role models!
Thankfully children's literature seems to suffer less from this alarming trend. At least my home countries Finland and Great Britain both have refressing and exciting books for children published every year. Yet still I can not have gone unnoticed the fairy fluff expanding also to this area of children's culture. As you probably notised I FEEL STRONGLY about this and as I also enjoy drawing for kids and inventing stories, why not to try to go down that path. Yeah, why not.

Which one of these heroines for young girls do you prefer: